Writing Workshops: Room With a View

Being stuck at home for weeks on end can be boring – but it doesn’t have to be.

Take a look out of the window. Zoom in on a detail then take a step back. Now start writing!

In the first of our online creative writing workshops for 13-18 year olds, author Beverley Ward will be exploring lockdown perspectives. We hope to show you that inspiration for writing can be found all around you, and provide pointers on how to describe what you’re seeing, thinking and feeling through words. You’ll be given individual feedback to that writing (if you want it), and in the second we’ll be running through how to edit your work. 

To help fuel that creative spark, here’s some inspiration –  books, films and poems and even a playlist – connected to the theme of windows. Why not make your own playlist and write along to it? Or use the titles or lyrics to write from.

If you want to join us for the workshops Monday 4th and Friday 8th May – find out more here. 

Long reads (don’t worry – you don’t have time to read these, but you might like to in the future)

A Room with a View – E M Forster

Room – Emma Donoghue

The High Window – Raymond Chandler 

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 

Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela

Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys

Waiting for the Barbarians – JM Coetzee

Short reads

Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich

I could see the smallest things by Raymond Carver

Mysterious Kor by Elizabeth Bowen

Poems

The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832 

The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings

The Lamplighter by Robert Louis Stevenson

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-lamplighter/

Silver by Water de la Mere

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/silver

There are lots more window poems here:

https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/window/page-1/28795/

Films

Rear Window 

Room

Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom

Songs

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3HDG07zVQpY1tyvbeYcUGQ?si=YtTmwqlWTlee7_wQfsSRmA

Flowers in the Window 

Only you (Looking from the window above)

Wuthering Heights (Let me in at your window)

I can’t stand the rain (against my windowpane)

Look through any window

Steamy windows

Window pane

Tap at my window

World outside your window

She came in through the bathroom window

Tom’s Diner (looking through the café window)

Have you got anything to add to this list? Please email us [email protected], we’d love to hear from you.