Following up from her book Acting Games for Improv, Sam Marsden is back with another release in her A Pocketful of Drama collection. These are really helpful books as they are exactly what they say,: a book that one can reach for without too much trouble and the need to flick through 350 pages. This book is around 90 pages long and offers excellent exercises to encourage practical ‘ways in’ to creative writing.
My first thought when reading this book was that it would be particularly helpful for English teachers as a way to get pupils out of their seats and into writing characters and stories inspired by practical work, perhaps as part of a creative writing or English Language course or scheme of work. I would definitely recommend the book to aid this type of desk-based classroom learning (and who doesn't like pushing the desks aside to make space for some practical work?) However, as the book went on, I found myself thinking that this would be an excellent resource for Drama teachers working on devised theatre, particularly with KS3 or as part of the GCSE assessment.
The sixth chapter, ‘Making Stories’, for example, offers some brilliant creative starting points for those struggling with narrative or structure. I was drawn to the ‘Improv with an inciting incident’ exercise which takes inspiration from another excellent read, Robert Mckee's screenwriting book, ‘Story.’ Using the ‘incident’ as a catalyst to set the action in motion struck me as a simple but effective way to move some devising work on in the early stages of the process. Another exercise in this chapter looks at using classic story archetypes to create work from, offering participants the choice of 5 stories to base their narrative on.
This particular exercise comes with a free downloadable handout (accessed by scanning a QR code) as do many of the activities in the book, which makes the employment of each idea much simpler in practical terms. As with the ‘Acting Games for Improv’ there are also scannable QR links to Spotify playlists which I definitely intend to make use of in my day-to-day teaching! All in all, this is certainly worth adding to the department collection, to help with developing practical work as well as to improve creative writing.