A course for all those who want to write fiction but haven't, and for those for those who have just embarked on writing a novel or short stories but are uncertain either how to progress or whether they're going in the right direction.
There is no bar on the type of narrative the participant wants to produce. It can be long or short, literary or popular, adult or juvenile (or even for children). All these different kinds of literature undoubtedly look different on the outside but on the inside they all rest on the same foundation: they all depend on character and a communication of a sense of a character's personality, and they all examine and exploit the relationship between events and character out of which fiction arises.
All stories rest on the same bedrock, so whichever direction you want to head in, this course will engage your creativity and productivity. By the end of the course you should have a sense of how narrative works; and you should have amassed some prose you can call your own, say 5,000 words - that's a couple of short stories, or a chapter from a novel.
The course will comprise two-hour evening sessions over a four-month period and one Saturday session when everyone will meet for a day. Using existing texts the course director will use a mixture of texts to enunciate the basic narrative principles thereby give participants the basic tools necessary to narratives of their own.
This is a practical course and participants will be required from week one to write and, as the course progresses less and less time will be devoted in the session to the texts provided, and more and more time will be devoted to close reading and careful discussion of what the participants write. These peer review sessions will be guided by Carlo Gébler and will focus on how the writer might say what they say even better than they are already saying it.
If you are interested in this course there are three things you need to bring with you:
1. An interest in character and narrative
2. Something of about 2000 words of fiction to bring to the first session. These are not for the course leader to read (and he cannot undertake to read them over the course of the course) but you must have them in order that he can start a conversation about where you want to go.
3. A willingness to write! And to share what you write with the other members of the course, read it aloud and discuss it with them.
There are 15 places on this course. The course costs €1,500.