The Landlady by R Dahl Creative Writing

In Roald Dahl’s story The Landlady, young Billy Weaver finds himself alone at night in the city of Bath looking for overnight lodgings on a work placement from his Head Office. 'Find your own lodgings, he (his boss) had said, “and then go along and report to the Branch Manager as soon as you’ve got yourself settled”. Billy is seventeen, keen to get on in his career, and he is feeling ‘just fine’.

Before long Billy finds an inexpensive looking guest house where he is mesmerized by the sign ‘Bed and Breakfast’. The Landlady opens the door…as if she had been expecting him! ‘She seemed terribly nice. She looked exactly like the mother of one’s best school-friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays’.

And so Billy is shown around by a slightly dotty old landlady. But…after all…she is obviously harmless, isn’t she? And then Billy notices two names of guests in the guets book, and tries hard to remember where he has heard those names before…

Roald Dahl’s tale is a classic tale of the unexpected, hugely popular with students, and deliciously macabre. It is studied for its style, and as an excellent example of the literary technique of foreshadowing, or hinting at what is to come. It is also used as a springboard for a piece of creative writing, which is the purpose these writing prompts included here.

The writing task, is to write The Landlady’s Diary.

I have included here two writing ‘prompts’ of different types; one is a modelled start of the first three paragraphs to the landlady’s diary, the other is a writing ‘prompt’ or writing frame; which simply gives the writer the opening sentence of each paragraph, and can of course be added to/amended/edited as the student writer chooses. You will of course need the Roald Dahl short story ‘The Landlady’, which is available as a PDF online.