Young writers are full of horror

What I learned from teaching a workshop to 10 year olds about anxiety, horror and distrust

I recently taught a writing workshop to a group of 10-13 year olds. The focus was on crafting science fiction and fantasy, something I’ve written about and talked about for many years, but I’d never delivered a workshop to such young writers before.

Part of the challenge was the range of development and skills. 10 is actually very different to 13. A 10 year old can potentially still behave more like a very young child, while a 13 year old is verging on wanting to be an adult. I didn’t want to talk down to them or overly simplify the workshop, so we properly went for it with an exploration of character, themes, coming up with ideas, plot, avoiding tropes and more. It was challenging stuff, especially for the younger writers, but they all handled it.

The students had no idea what ‘LitRPG’ is.

Young people are fiercely intelligent, way ahead of the curve in understanding shifts in culture and language, see the world in a more tolerant and nuanced way and are generally quite impressive compared to anyone my age (I’m 42).

The main revelation for me was in the interests of the group. There were about ten writers in the workshop and dominant themes became clear very early.

In short, these kids are terrified.