Online writing project - We Write Every Day

We Write Every Day

As the UK enters ‘lockdown’ along with much of the rest of the world, many celebrities, teachers, musicians and fitness coaches have come forward with online resources to help keep young people’s minds and bodies active. Many of these resources focus on supporting parents with home schooling or provide learning opportunities.

We Write Every Day also aims to support young people but looks beyond the goal-directed national curriculum. The project encourages young people to express themselves or to keep a record, in whatever form, of their experiences, thoughts and hopes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Academic researchers have started to recognise the benefit of creative writing in working with young people, particularly on projects that seek to capture the experience, or amplify the voices, of disadvantaged young people (Satchwell et al, 2020). Creative writing has also long-been recognised as therapeutic in terms of expressing and sharing trauma. As the pandemic disrupts social norms, young people in many different situations face new traumas and anxieties about the pandemic and an uncertain future. At the same time, they must adjust to the removal of many of their civil liberties.

We Write Every Day offers writing not as a learning activity but as a process that supports young people to explore their shifting sense of self and community. The open-ended tasks also allow young writers to imagine possible futures in a time of great uncertainty. The project is not prescriptive and there are no set outcomes.

Our prompts come from researchers in the Centre for Youth Studies as well as from published authors. Coming up in the next few days, we have inspiration from Sam Gayton (author of The Last Zoo), Miriam Halahmy (author of Always Here For You and Behind Closed Doors) and Frances Hardinge (author of Deeplight and The Lie Tree). The writers recently delighted participants in our Youth Book Club Project with their recent innovative and inspirational work and we are very grateful for their expertise as we get We Write Every Day going. The project is looking to source more prompts for inspiration – so please get in touch with us via the Tumblr or through twitter. I

We Write Every Day follows the ethos of MCYS in making this project participatory and collaborative. We are shifting focus from writing about young people to writing by young people.

We Write Every Day is on Tumblr and Twitter.