Sophia and Kelly, Write Club - Bout Yeh photographers Belfast photo 6246.

The first rule of Write Club is . . .

I like telling stories and conveying the world through fictional and preposterous ideas. That’s my whole shtick.

I’ve always liked writing and it’s taken me years to find somewhere I can write and that people will get me. A place I can share my work and not feel self conscious, and that is what Fighting Words is.

It doesn’t matter what people think. Just be yourself.

It’s cheesy, but it’s true.

Sophia (Write Club, Belfast)

I’m a volunteer at Write Club and a writing mentor.

The kids come along to Write Club with whatever they want to write, and if they want some feedback or help they come to the mentor’s, and we help them out.

When I was a teenager there was nothing like Write Club. There was no writing group in my school. I didn’t know anybody else who wrote. I just thought I was a bit weird.

I would have loved to have a group of friends back then who also wrote, and that I could talk about writing and books with.

Kelly McCaughrain (mentor, Write Club, Belfast)

Story by Bout Yeh photographers Belfast

Image - Sophia and Kelly of Write Club photographed by Bout Yeh photographers Belfast - photo 6250

Photography by Stephen S T Bradley for Bout Yeh at a Tenx9 fundraiser for Fighting Words Belfast at Titanic Hotel, Belfast

Set up by Irish author Roddy Doyle (The Commitments, The Van) and Sean Love, Fighting Words is an Ireland-wide network of creative-writing centres. Write Club gives time and space for young people aged between 13 and 18 to come to Fighting Words and work on their own independent writing projects.

Fighting Words Belfast runs free creative writing workshops for children and young people aged 6 to 18.

Workshops take place primarily in Skainos, east Belfast, as well as the Duncairn Centre for Culture and Arts in north Belfast. School and youth groups set out on a story-writing journey with trained volunteer mentors, working at first collaboratively and then individually to create new stories. All participants leave as published writers with their own storybook.