Crafting Tension with the Young Writers
Our most recent Young Writers workshop explored a crucial element of creating a story. Storytelling relies on change, and change creates tension. To illustrate the point, we started with a warmup exercise based on singing. We sang a scale as a group and considered what happened physically as our voices moved up and down.
When we’d introduced the theme of the workshop, I enjoyed introducing the group to one of my favourite poems. Rumi’s Don’t Go Back To Sleep uses repetition in a way that raises the stakes each time the refrain comes around.
Don’t Go Back To Sleep The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
I invited our writers to invent their own lines that we could use to build poems. We gathered some wonderful examples, and I kept a record so that we can use them again in future workshops.
The writers produced some beautiful poems, in just seven lines, borrowing from the structure that Rumi’s poem uses. Exploring story structure was the main focus of the workshop, and we used Five Act structure as our framework.
Act 1 – Home We meet the character in their familiar world. An inciting incident then disrupts this world in a way that means they can’t return to life as they knew it -(the inciting incident)
Act 2 – Frustration They try to restore order. Things may appear to improve, but new obstacles or conflicts arise, making their journey increasingly challenging.
Act 3 – Nightmare! (Midpoint and Crisis) Tension escalates. The character encounters a crisis — the “nightmare” — which brings a moment of realisation. They understand they cannot restore the original order, prompting a significant change. This is the turning point that pushes them onto a new path. Plan B begins.
Act 4 – Final Battle Armed with their new understanding or approach, they face their ultimate challenge — and overcome it.
Act 5 – Resolution We see where they land, and most importantly, how they have changed.
We invited our writers to use the Writers’ Block archive to develop a story, working in pairs and then outline it according to five act structure. The final challenge was to finish the story, sketching out each of the acts in five-minute increments. Understanding structure means that you don’t run out of steam when you are trying to write a story.
As writers, we embark with enthusiasm and want to share everything we know about the world we’ve built. Doing this all at once is a great way to lose the thread of your story. Fortunately, our group now have a framework that they can use to develop any story that they want to tell.
Our December event for young writers is a masterclass in performance poetry, hosted by Meg Chapman. Regular Young Writers workshops will resume in January 2026. Booking information for these classes can be found here.
