Schools and colleges through the ages has been places of high emotion presenting many great writing opportunities.
School or college are fantastic places to get ideas for writing because they are places of high emotion where all sorts of people meet and interact and, above all, good story writing is about people. Places, although often full of atmosphere, are just the context in which people react to each other.
A big advantage of setting your stories in a school or college is the ready readership who share an interest in this immensely rich community of people.
Whether your relationship with your school or college is as a student or as an adult, through teaching, administration or being a Governor, spending some time passing your writers eye over the huge story writing opportunities will probably be time well spent.
Each of the people in your school or college have their own dreams and ambitions, loves and challenges and the interaction between all these people form a web of relationships that are often exploited by many television soaps and other writers for writing ideas.
However, just observing the people and stories around you is not enough to produce a great writing idea. It is vital that your creative mind is applied to all the situations, smells, people and places you come across to weave your own personal story.
And the most powerful tool in a writer’s armoury is to ask ‘what if?’
What if so and so formed a relationship with so and so? How would their group of friends respond? What if that person became the most popular person in the school or college? What if they became the most unpopular? What if they became the most successful or the greatest failure? What if teachers became students and students became teachers? What if aliens were running the school or college and programming the minds of the students to help the aliens take over the world? What if one of the students ran amok shooting everybody in sight? What if there was an epidemic and the school or college was sealed off to prevent the epidemic infecting people outside the school or college?
Emotions run high in schools and colleges. There is fear of failure in exams. Fear of getting dumped by one’s boyfriend or girlfriend. Even teachers can sometimes fear a difficult class or the next teaching inspection. All these are areas of feelings that your readers may want to explore and which therefore could produce a good idea for writing.
My short story about bullying ‘Classmate from Hell‘, has received a steady stream of readers ever since it was written and put online. In this story, painful childhood memories persuade the otherwise successful female character to meet her childhood bully again.
Whatever your standpoint, observing and reflecting on your memories or current experiences of life in your school or college are very likely to provide you with a great spring of ideas for writing your next short story or novel.
Bye for now
Rob