Creative Writing Workshop with Annalise Avery

Reviewed by E Scott

You wouldn’t expect to be able to write a whole novel based on the choices of a dice, would you?

Annalise Avery proved us all wrong with this creative writing workshop for the young adults who went to the Wigtown Book Festival. Although this workshop was aimed at young people, there were people of all ages attending this engaging event.

Using this unique way of writing, she got everyone to write down 10 genres and roll the dice twice. This is how we got our genres for our books, and we continued to pick 10 things and roll the dice until we created a storyline.

Annalise has been using this technique since she got into Dungeons & Dragons in lockdown, and she would play with her writer friends. She enjoyed the fact that the dice determined a lot of things and used it in her recent novel, The Immortal Games, where she used a dice with the 12 astrological signs on each side. Each time she would roll the dice, it would determine who she would kill off.

While this was a very engaging event, it was also full of humour that got the crowd laughing. Throughout the whole hour, she seemed very excited to be able to do this for us. She asked us many questions about what our story would be like, and we asked her many questions about her stories. She let us keep the dice so we could continue using this technique.

All in all, this was a very engaging, entertaining and educational event.