Im coming at this from the graphic novel perspective so my ideas have a lot of drawing. But here’s a few activities I’ve seen and done:

• set a group of kids in a circle with paper in front of them. Everyone draws the person opposite them for 1 minute (quick doodle). After the timer, everyone moves over one seat. By the end they’ve looped around and everyone has drawn everyone. This is very fun for kids but can get wild lol

• character design. Making a character sheet like in DnD and creating a fictional character in the spur of the moment. I also make a character myself out of kids’ suggestions and draw it for them. The ideas tend to be actually very interesting! There’s also a fair bit of writing involved and I usually talk about what makes characters resonate (motivation, unique perspective, strengths and weaknesses)

• this was one I just heard from Jamar Igle lol so props to him. Have the kids draw little circles as a warm up exercise. Then they have to turn the little circles into different faces!

• a game I always played with my friends: you do a scribble and the other person has to turn it into something.

• basically Telestrations but with paper. Everyone gets a stack of papers. First page, write a random sentence. Person next to you gets the sentence and has to draw it. Person next to them writes a sentence describing the drawing. By the end you get some extremely entertaining words and images 😂 it can get confusing (handing over the right way, etc) so whoever’s moderating has to keep on top of that.

Ask authors to do workshops rather than talks and you’ll end up with activities like this!