Harriet was part of the first ever Young Writers Programme at Co-op Academy Manchester in 2023/24. Bursting with energy and a love for writing, she talks about her experience in the weekly sessions at school, being part of the Young Writers Residential 2024, and her aspirations for the future.
The First Story group was announced in English last year, and I decided to go, because I really like trying something new. I used to write all the time, basically whatever came to my mind, and the club sounded really fun, it was such a nice atmosphere at the first sessions so I wanted to keep going back.
We don’t do a lot of free writing in English, it’s really structured, so it was nice to have a bit of time to just free write. It was a lot more like my creativity was more open during the sessions and I had the space to just think about anything.
I really liked the process of editing all our work, because I got to look through everything I’d wrote and then edit it to make it even better. I used to be terrible at putting my ideas down, but now it’s a lot easier to write what I’m thinking; now it’s more like a structured story instead of just random things.
I first heard about the summer residential through the weekly sessions. There was 100 word story going on at the same time, that I wanted to apply for. So I wrote the 100 word story and used that as my residential application instead. It appealed to me as I like to meet new people and liked the idea of going away for a week. At first,I thought it was just in Manchester, and then I realized it was everywhere and so that was pretty cool to meet people from all the different regions that do First Story because I wanted different viewpoints to make my writing better.
The residential itself was so much better than I thought it was going to be. I thought it would be very like strict and very heavily writing. But it was quite free, and we could share our ideas, oh and the setting was so beautiful and very calm. It was easy to concentrate whilst there. Now I feel like the ideas I have are more creative and interesting. Before it was kind of generic ideas, but now there’s more unique ideas that come into my mind, and maybe more style to it.
I thought it’d be a bit awkward as well, because none of us have met before, and I thought I’d be a bit quiet, but we all just hit it off so quickly. We all had different, interesting hobbies, but we all found common ground on writing and being creative. We’re still messaging on the group chat today, and we all said we’re going to meet up again.
When I think about the future, I want to go into law or politics; something along the lines of that. By being part of First Story this year, it’s helped me to become more fluent in public speaking. To go into those pathways, you need to be able to speak your mind and make it make sense. First Story has allowed me to do that on paper, and then say it out loud.
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