Steven Camden Learning Resources

Creating a character and writing a dramatic monologue

CFE Level 3, 4 and senior phase (ages 12-16)

About Steven Camden

Steven Camden began literary life as a spoken word artist, a field in which he is now one of the most respected artists in the UK. Performing as Polarbear, Steven’s raw and moving poems will strike a chord with any teenager moving through rites of passage. Steven is also the author of two fantastic novels, Tape and It’s About Love. His first play, Back Down, toured in spring 2015 to a fantastic reception. Steven’s stories about love, coming of age and discovery will resonate with you and your pupils, and his work has the potential to inspire pupils and get them excited about poetry and storytelling.

About this resource

In this resource you’ll find a series of activities designed to help pupils create a character, and then write and perform a dramatic monologue poem spoken by this character.

Of course this approach won’t suit everyone, and you can take the activities and mould them into your own approach to character creation and/or performance poetry.

For a different approach, which used performance poetry as a means of debate and discursive writing, check out our Word War case study:

Creating a character

The joy of creating a character permeates Steven’s novel It’s About Love.

Luke and Leia in It’s About Love are passionate film buffs and writers who obsess over creating richly detailed characters for their script. They draw inspiration from real life and mould their sometimes difficult life experiences into fiction, playing with ideas until they have fully formed and convincing characters.

Getting excited about charactersEng 4-19a, Eng 4-27a,Lit 4-29a

Ask your class or book group to write down some of their favourite characters from books, movies, TV shows or computer games. Ask some volunteers to tell the rest about one of the characters they have written down and why this character is a favourite for them.

Now, discuss what makes a good character. Ask your pupils to watch this section of WatchMojo’s top 10 most iconic movie characters: Ask them to take notes about what the video seems to value in a character. After the video, discuss character with your pupils: what makes a character memorable? What kind of things make you root for or care about a character? Do they have to be perfect to be likeable?

Ask pupils to come up with their own top 5 style article or even video celebrating their favourite characters. They can introduce the text by discussing what makes for good characters, and then go into depth about why their chosen characters fit the bill.

Extension tasks for getting excited about charactersEng 4-31a

•Fan fiction – have pupils select one of their favourite characters and write a new scene featuring that character. They will need to give the character a new problem or challenge to overcome, and think carefully about how to keep the character consistent. They may need to create a new antagonist character as well.

•Reimagine a character – a great one for the superhero fans. ‘Re-boots’ or ‘re-imaginings’ of popular movies and movie franchises are quite common nowadays, e.g., Batman, Terminator Genisys, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Often, fans will be divided by a new writer’s portrayal of a familiar character. Ask your pupils to make notes about the way the character has been portrayed before, and then come up with a new way to portray the character. For example, Batman has been portrayed as brooding and melancholy in some films, and more of a wisecracking action hero in others!

Moving on to creating charactersLit 4-20a,Eng 4-31a

Below, we’ve suggested some activities which can help your pupils to come up with a well-rounded character. They don’t need to do all the activities, and they don’t need to be done in order: you can adapt to suit your class or book group.

•Use an image - In this video, Steven Camden reveals that he always starts with an image, either of an object or a person Have your pupils browse some images online and invent a character based on those images. Humans of New York is a great place to find interesting images of people - there are lots of pinboards on Pinterest which have collected images from HONY, but here’s one to start you off:

•Mirror exercise - ask pupils to imagine that their character is looking in the mirror and describing themselves. They should go into detail about facial features, clothes and any other noticeable features.

•Motivations - ask your pupils to write down something your character really wants, something they need, something they fear and something they resent. This will really help them create depth and understand how to shape their character’s behaviour and decisions. Use our Creative Writing Masterclass videos with Phil Earle to help your pupils further develop their characters - the video on characters is obviously of most relevance here, but the whole series is definitely worth checking out:

•Questions to ask your character - in order to create a fully rounded character, you need to find out about them. This site has a handy list of questions to help get to know your character better - you can pick out the ones you think will be most helpful to your pupils:

Notes before you go on to creating poetry

•Although it’s not essential, it’s probably much better if the characters your pupils create are based in an everyday reality your pupils can recognise or at least imagine. Superheroes and gangsters, for example, are fun characters to explore, but it’s probably easier to write a poem from the point of view of more identifiable characters.

•Here are couple more thoughts from writers on creating characters:

“...I can’t set a word on paper until I hear the right voice in my head.”

Jean Kwok[1]

“Listen to what you have written. Adud rhythm in a passage of dialoguemay show that you don't yet understand the characters well enoughtowrite in their voices.”

Helen Dunmore[2]

Writing and performing poetry

Introducing your pupils to performance poetryEng 4-19a

Have a quick chat with your pupils about their preconceptions about poetry. What does the word mean to them? What kind of things do they think people write poetry about? Why do they think people write poetry in the first place?

Show Steven’s poem Jessica to your pupils (the first four seconds are potentially school-unfriendly, so this link will take you to around 5 seconds in): " " " " Talk about the poem. Did they enjoy it? Did the fact that it was performed rather than just written down add anything to their enjoyment? What kind of themes did they pick out? Did they have a favourite part?

Now, ask your pupils to look at the following blog post: Divide them into groups and ask each group to listen to a different poem, then ask them to discuss the same questions as they did for the Steven Camden poem above. They can make notes if you feel this will help with the next part.

After this, ask groups to split up and form new groups, making sure that each member of the new group has listened to a different poem. Ask each member of the group to tell the rest what their poem was about, if they enjoyed it, what the themes were, etc.

For homework, ask your class or book group to listen to the poem they liked the sound of most from what their classmates have told them. At your next meeting, ask each pupil to vote for their favourite poem by writing down the name of the poem on a post it along with their favourite part and the reasons they liked it.

Writing a poemEng 4-31a, Lit 3-24a

Your pupils should have lots of notes and ideas about their character, so they will have plenty to draw on for the content of the poem. Some people will feel comfortable planning a poem first, others will be happier looking through their ideas and coming up with ideas for lines before trying to put everything together.

If you think your pupils will benefit from having a structure in place, it can help to use the poem to tell a story. They can place their character in a familiar setting - a local park, their school, etc - and think of an incident that could take place in that character’s life, perhaps involving an antagonist character. They can draw on a conventional story structure - setting the scene, introducing conflict, building to a climax and then showing the resolution of the story.

Playing with languageEng 4-27a

It’s best not to place too much emphasis on including metaphors, similes, etc. in a poem for the sake of it, but it’s definitely good to encourage your pupils to play around with imagery to see if they think their poem would benefit from it. Have a look at the Scottish Poetry Library’s resources on playing with language for some ideas:

Getting used to performing: emphasising wordsLit 4-03a

To make sure pupils aren’t reading in a flat monotone, here’s a quick exercise for them to practise intonation. Ask pupils to look at the first few lines of Shane Coyczan's poem To This Day (you can watch the poem here: :

When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed,

because my mother said if you're not careful

someday someone's gonna break it.

Take it from me: under the bed

is not a good hiding spot.

I know because I’ve been shot down so many times

I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself.

Ask pupils to take turns reading the poem (or perhaps just the first few lines) out loud, with each pupil putting emphasis on different words, speeding up and slowing down at different points. What do they think is the best way to read these lines? Get them to mark down where they would change pace, where they would pause for effect and where they would place particular emphasis on a word.

This idea comes from Kathy Norris. You can find lots more great ideas for getting pupils ready to perform here:

Another suitable poem for this exercise include Sarah Kay’s poem On the Discomfort of Being in the Same Room as the Boy You Like (which can easily be re-written to make the subject of the poem a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’!):

Getting used to performing: some poems to practise withLit 4-03a

Performing a piece of work you’ve written is a daunting task for anyone, so to get pupils used to this it might be a good idea to allow them to read out work by established poets first.

Give them a choice of 5 written poems and ask them to bring these to life with a reading. You can choose any poems which you feel are suitable for this task, but here are some suggestions to start you off:

Langley Lane by Jacob Polley:

Mametz Wood by Owen Sheers: (you can find out more about the context of this poem here:

The History Ain’t Bright by Mark Grist:

Bad Moon by Claire Askew:

The Mermaid and the Sailors by Claire Askew:

You can find lots more poems on the Poetry by Heart website:

Why not pick a poem yourself and model the process of performing? It doesn’t matter if you’re not too confident: showing this to pupils can actually help them to feel more comfortable and create an egalitarian atmosphere.

Performance tipsLit 4-03a

You can ask pupils to watch each other performing poems in pairs. Ask them to assess each other in terms of the following:

•Eye contact with audience;

•Pace: many people read too fast. The audience needs to be able to hear and understand what’s being said. Also, certain sections of a poem will benefit from being read faster or slower, and it’s also important to pause to allow some lines or sections to sink in;

•Clarity: again, the audience needs to be able to understand and absorb the words;

•Projection: one good tip is to ask your pupils to pick a point in the room and ‘throw’ their voice towards that point.

If it’s helpful, you can ask pupils to practice each of these skills one at a time in their readings before combining them all.

To practise pacing, a really good exercise is to write the poem out as prose and ask pupils to mark where they think the line breaks should be. This helps them to think about where pauses should be taken.

Time to perform!

Once pupils have written their poems and practised performing, it’s time to stage a performance! This can be quite daunting, so creating the right conditions is important. Have a think about these ideas:

Michael Rosen’s Poetry Cabaret idea might be a good one, especially if you want to involve parents:
You could ask pupils to pair up and help each other read out their poems;
Filming performances is always an option if pupils find performance in front of an audience too difficult.

Some final thoughts from a poet

The following thoughts from poet Claire Askew are here to provide inspiration and guidance to your pupils!

I write poetry for a lot of reasons. I really like poetry: I'm a geek about poetry the way some people are geeks about music or skateboarding or origami. That kind of geekiness where you see someone else do it, and your immediate thought is, "that's cool, I want to be able to do that, too!" That's why I started writing poetry: I read lots of it when I was a little kid (I was a bit of a weird little kid). I wanted to be able to write it, too. So I started out writing limericks and terrible rhyming poems. Like everything, I got better at it with practice.

There are also reasons I keep writing poetry, instead of writing other things. Poetry is short: you can get your message across very quickly. You can be a smartypants in a poem: you can put in a fancy rhyme or a really flowery image and people expect it. If you did the same thing in fiction, readers might find that a bit odd. But in poems you can play with language, you can think, "what would happen if...?" and then try it. Poems are much more flexible and experimental and weird and wonderful than any other form of writing I've found.

[1] Jean Kwok, How to Go From Complete Unknown to Published Author, , 3 September 2015

[2] Various authors, Ten Rules for Writing Fiction, , 3 September 2015