It is a Monday morning in the heart of Dublin. In a light, airy room situated in the shadow of the city's looming Croke Park stadium, two dozen schoolgirls in matching navy blue jumpers sit attentively on coloured beanbags. The room is lined with bookshelves. High up on one wall there are a series of framed posters entitled "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction", compiled by different well-known authors. In Anne Enright's rules, there is the warning: "Only bad writers think that their work is really good." Number One in Richard Ford's list is: "Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea."
The girls, aged eight, nine and 10, are not at that stage quite yet. They gaze around the room wide-eyed, cowed into silence by the excitement of unfamiliar surroundings and a morning off school.
"Does anybody know why you are here this morning?" asks a woman standing at the front.
A tentative hand goes up. "To write a story," comes the reply from a pupil called Sophie.
"That's right – and we're here to help you."
The girls' legs jiggle in anticipation. This is Fighting Words, a workshop set up by the author Roddy Doyle in 2009 to encourage creative writing in students of all ages across Ireland. Since its inception, the centre has seen several thousand come through its doors. The majority are from local primary schools in Ballybough, an economically deprived area of Dublin, but other students have travelled hundreds of miles. Fighting Words, which relies largely on volunteer staff and offers all its lessons free of charge, has proved so popular that sessions are booked up a year in advance. "The interest is huge," says Sean Love, the executive director and co-founder. "We're obviously filling a gap that is not filled in formal education."
In a climate of arts cuts and economic gloom, the centre relies on private donations to keep going – its operating costs are about ¤300,000 a year (£250,000). To this end, Fighting Words is about to issue a hand-printed, collector's edition of short stories written by Annie Proulx, Colm Tóibín, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie among others. It is hoped that the sale of the book will raise enough for the centre to stay open for a further two or three months.
Within 20 minutes, today's group has chosen (via a scrupulously conducted vote) a main character for their story called Dude the Vampire. They are then encouraged to invent a sidekick (Blackie the Bat) before coming up with a plot and dialogue for their characters, which is typed up by a volunteer on a laptop and projected onto a large screen so that everyone can read it. Rose, a final-year art student, is on hand to draw illustrations.
The collective method of writing throws up some interesting suggestions. When asked what Dude the Vampire's greatest wish might be, a small girl in the front row with long dark hair, held back by a sparkly pink scrunchie, puts up her hand. "He wants to eat a monkey," she says.
There is a gentle laugh from a bespectacled man in a leather jacket, sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room. The man is Roddy Doyle, the Booker prize-winning novelist whose first novel, The Commitments, caused a sensation on its publication in 1987. Doyle went on to become one of Ireland's most prolific and beloved writers: every Dublin taxi driver I meet has read at least one of his books. "I'm not recognised that much," Doyle insists. "I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican."
When Doyle established Fighting Words, the intention was not only to inspire children and young adults who might otherwise be struggling with literacy to write, but also to regenerate a down-at-heel part of the city where many children do not have English as their first language, and which had provided the backdrop for several of Boyle's own books.
The centre, which takes its name from a common Dublin expression meaning words used to advance an argument, was also partly a response to a lack of creativity in Doyle's own education. The Christian Brothers who ran his secondary school gave him no encouragement to write fiction. For years, Doyle simply assumed he didn't have the talent or discipline to put pen to paper. Today's children, he says, deserve better.
"When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did," he says. "There was an absence of thought [about creative writing] which seems daft in retrospect." Doyle didn't start writing regularly until he became an English and geography teacher in his 20s. "I didn't have the discipline until then."
The discipline of writing, he explains, is particularly important for the young people who come here. "It's the freedom to challenge your mind, to admit failure and then to start again. Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.
"I think this…" Doyle gestures to the group of schoolgirls now sitting bent over desks, attempting to write their own endings to Dude the Vampire's story, "opens their heads to the value of their own decisions and willpower to rewrite. It's about working hard to make something good enough. That's the deep satisfaction." He mentions a group of young women who came in after being on a government work scheme. "They'd been failed by the education system," says Doyle. "They didn't think they could write. But I can see the difference from when they first come in – it's visually apparent – and it's a quick transition from thinking 'I can't do anything' to 'I can do something'."
As Sara Bennett, manager of Fighting Words, puts it: "I can see kids' imaginations sparking. We offer a space to be free to be creative."
Part of the centre's success derives from the quality of the teaching. Doyle, a father of three whose work includes several children's books, can relate easily to the students and lives round the corner. He is a frequent presence, as is fellow Booker winner, Anne Enright. The patrons of Fighting Words include illustrious literary figures such as Colum McCann, Maeve Binchy and Lorrie Moore.
"Everybody here's very nice about my writing," says 17-year-old Hannah Gaden Gilmartin, who has been coming to Fighting Words' weekly drop-in sessions for young adults for the last 18 months. "Sometimes I just get a general idea and I want it to work with certain characters, so I'll just start writing and Roddy Doyle or whoever is here to help out will come and look at what I've done and make some suggestions and then I get on with it. It's always very constructive advice, phrased in a helpful way.
"It's a good opportunity to be creative. There's not really the opportunity to do creative writing at school. Writing makes me feel excited. Even if it's going really well, you're looking forward to doing the next bit, to the next scene coming up. I think I do want to be a writer when I leave school."
Hannah is currently hard at work on her first novel – a fantasy with a protagonist called Jan. She's "not 100% sure yet" what is going to happen. According to Doyle, the majority of stories produced at Fighting Words are: "A never-ending battle between love and violence." Even with the eight-year-olds? He smiles. "Especially with them."
It was a trip to visit his friend the author Dave Eggers in America that inspired Doyle to start Fighting Words. In 2002, Eggers had founded 826 Valencia, a non-profit organisation to help children and young adults develop writing skills, in the Mission District of San Francisco. The centre, built behind a shop selling "pirate supplies" such as tubs of lard and eye-patches, offers free workshops and field trips as well as publishing an array of student-authored literary journals. It has been such a success that it now has seven more chapters in the US and has inspired projects as far afield as Australia and Kenya.
Doyle wanted to do something similar and started looking for premises. An estate agent took him to a disused office space near the famous Croke Park stadium and it was this building that would become a state-of-the-art creative writing centre in the heart of the city. Fighting Words was the first centre of its kind in Europe and saw 11,000 children through its doors in the first 17 months, but similar initiatives have sprouted up in its wake, including the Ministry of Stories in London, brainchild of author Nick Hornby and art entrepreneurs Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab.
Like Fighting Words, the Ministry of Stories, which opened in 2010, chose for its location a city neighbourhood caught between deprivation and regeneration – Hoxton, east London. Funded by the Arts Council, the Ministry is fronted by a shop selling "monster supplies" (a jar of "thickest human snot" being a prime example) and has formed a link between disparate, co-existing communities: the young professionals in technology start-ups bustling around Old Street; the well-off residents of gentrified Georgian housing; and those that live in nearby council estates, afflicted by one of the highest rates of child poverty in the country. It was also a part of London badly affected by last summer's riots.
The effect of such projects is, by its nature, difficult to quantify but Macnab believes that the process of a child sitting down to write a story, then giving them a copy of their published work, can have enormous impact on a young person's self-worth.
"We're encouraging and motivating young people to write and have confidence in their voice. I think writing and being able to express oneself is really vital for being able to take part in society," she says. "There's a confidence that comes with getting it right. And then there's the social nature of talking about writing, where people are enthusiastic about listening to you and seeing your work honoured and respected and enjoyed by others. All of those things are important."
Key to this is getting children engaged in the first place. Although Doyle has no pirate or monster merchandise on offer at Fighting Words, he and Sean Love did introduce some "anarchic" elements of their own, including an unseen editor called Editor McConkey who is famously grumpy and makes comically disparaging remarks to the students through a frosted window in one of the bookshelves. The playfulness is crucial in getting introverted, sullen or nervous children engaged.
Today, Editor McConkey's avowal that "Girls can't write stories" has already been met with a shrieking chorus of disapproval. At the end of the session, Editor McConkey will admit that he was wrong before handing out a printed booklet of "Dude and Blackie's Plan to Destroy the World" to each pupil. One third of the story is left blank for the children to fill in their own endings.
The girls are clearly thrilled. "In my ending, Dude destroys the world but then he's lonely," says one of them, shiny-eyed. "So he brings the world back again with a special weapon."
"For these children, writing is important – even to the ones who don't read a lot," says Doyle. "The idea that they'll have their name on a book means everything to them. Whereas if you put it on the internet, it doesn't mean anything."
Love agrees: "Getting a book for them is a huge moment. The physical object is important."
This reverence for the physical object itself is reflected in Fighting Words's latest fundraising drive: a limited-edition, hand-printed book comprising 10 specially commissioned 800-word short stories by some of the world's leading writers, plus an exclusive etching by the Irish-American Turner prize nominee Sean Scully. Each of the 150 copies has been individually signed by the authors – Proulx, Tóibín, Oates, Rushdie, Enright, Russell Banks, John Banville, Richard Bausch, David Mitchell, and Sam Shepard – and will sell for ¤1,950 (around £1,625). It is a mark of how highly Fighting Words is regarded (and a measure of Doyle's charm) that the compilation has attracted such notable contributors.
"We sat and made a list of the people we most wanted and because of their great generosity, we didn't have to go far beyond the original 10," says Doyle. "The hardest thing was actually getting the stories delivered to people to sign."
The stories, printed on oversized pages of blotting paper thickness, were not the kind of thing you could pop in a letter-box. Instead, they were carefully packed into slim wooden containers and shipped, complete with pencil, for the authors to sign. "The worst to get to was Annie Proulx," recalls Doyle. "She said she lived down a lane. When you say 'a lane' in Ireland, it's 25 yards. A lane in Annie's case was 47 miles through snowy ravines in Wyoming."
There was no set theme for the stories submitted and no restrictions other than word count. Proulx has written about last year's floods in Australia. Banville's story is about his time working the night-shift on a newspaper. Oates's tale revolves around a soldier returning from Afghanistan.
Back in the classroom at Fighting Words, it is tempting to wonder how many of these young girls will go on to become world-famous writers. At the end of their session, they file out onto the street shepherded by teachers. The children are in high spirits, chatting about the morning's events, and each one clasping a stapled sheaf of A4 containing their illustrated story. On the back cover, there is a photograph of each individual child. Beside it, there is space for them to add their own author biography.
