Course information

Designed to give you the practical skills to approach your creative writing projects with confidence, this creative writing course is built around particular topics integral to the writing process such as: voice, place evocation, characterisation, structure, sentence-craft and editing. Using exercises to get started, we will look at the basic elements of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) and at ways to develop your work. This creative writing course is an invaluable way to find your voice as a writer.

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• write prose or poetry with more elegance
• express both self and place more authentically
• craft writing that tells your stories in your own voices
• avoid cliché and coin original turns of phrase and shapely sentences
• practise the rules of good style embodied in the best writing
• plan and structure memorable tales
• know the difference between your best writing and your second best
• edit and trim your writing for more impact and readability.

What's writing for?

• Introduction
• How we will work together
• The nature of creative writing - how it happens, how it works on a reader
• How writing is talking, heightened by art, and set down on paper
• What works and what doesn't
• Fiction and non-fiction; poetry and prose
• Voice and self, music and place
• The art of indirection

From a deep place

• Writing what we don't know about what we do
• Writing from the very centre of ourselves, out of everything we are and everywhere we've been and whom we've been there with
• The necessary strangeness of one's own perception, mind and voice
• Writing from now for all time

Style is substance

• Why less is generally more
• Plain and fancy style
• How fashionable writing, by definition, goes out of fashion, but stylish writing never does
• The art of the sentence
• Verbs
• Rationing your modifiers

Tools and techniques

• The secrets of plot and pace and place and speech and character
• Some prose and poetry forms

Wild mind, tidy mind

• Why form and structure count and how they help
• Getting started
• Keeping going
• Knowing when you're done
• The Tao of the long-distance writer

The finish

• The draft and the many edits
• Editing yourself and being edited
• Making the work ready to publish
• How and where and why (and why not) to get published

This workshop targets beginning writers of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. It will also help experienced writers rediscover their creativity and improve their technique.

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

The workshop marries informally delivered pedagogy with inspirational ideas and practical tips from an experienced professional writer. It models great writing through a selection of fine readings across all genres; and it invites you to write each week and receive tutelage and feedback from the facilitator and fellow participants.

Course notes are distributed electronically using Dropbox

Dillard, A 1989, The Writing Life, Harper Collins, New York.

Le Guin, U 1998, Steering the Craft, Eight Mountain Press, Portland.

Strunk, W and White, EB 2000, The Elements of Style, 4th edition, Allyn & Bacon, Boston.

Zinsser, W 1998, On Writing Well, 6th edition, Harper Collins, New York.