A Forsyth Saga

Robbery and murder came to a rural Hertfordshire town on Thursday 24th of June 2004. The police were baffled by a break in at a Broxbourne bank and further confused when two people on their suspects list were killed, two more fled the country and a fifth vanished. It seems the only people who knew the details of the crime and the whereabouts of the stolen cash were a handful of students at The Broxbourne School reading group.

The elaborate heist was their idea, urged on by best selling author Frederick Forsyth and the whole scheme was cooked up in the serenity of the school library, watched over by the director of learning resources, Sue Shaper. As the children relaxed in the beanbags and listened to Frederick, they let their minds run wild, devising a plot for a short story as part of Big Arts Week.

Frederick has been a firm supporter of Big Arts Week from the beginning and always gives time each year to visit local schools for readings and story-writing sessions during the week. He firmly believes in developing the arts with the younger generations, especially as he was given no encouragement in creative writing whilst at school. Mr Forsyth also explained to the children how books had been in existence for many years and were still popular despite the rise in new technologies, with many books from his childhood still favourites now as then.

The children had studied one of the author’s short stories and had answered questions on it to start the session and then they set out about a group effort. A theme was agreed on, a plot developed and gradually the twists and turns were weaved into it. After a short break, the children took to the computers to put the key points together, working in pairs on different aspects of the outline as Frederick took time to chat with each group about the developments as the story progressed. The object of the morning was to show how background information and research were important to writing. With the structure they were building, the students would be able to construct a work of fiction with a flowing plotline.

At the end of the session, the students gathered around a table to piece together the different parts of the story with Mr Forsyth, taking the separate group elements to make the complete synopsis. The morning was a complete success and the students and teachers deciding to complete the whole story in further sessions at their study group. There could even be a published version, with Frederick and the school as joint authors, so if you want to know what happened in the end, you’ll have to wait.