This three-month course is designed for fiction writers who are starting out, or for those who have already begun but perhaps feel the need of a course correction. You want to write fiction, of course you do. But you want to write your own fiction. Fiction that is distinctive, new. Fiction that comes out of your own subjective experience of the world, and out of your own subjective reading of great literature. Fiction that is yours.
With plenty of contact time with the tutor to offer strong support for your own exploratory process, Writing Fiction offers an involved three month process.
The questions we'll be exploring are:
- Why fiction? Why make things up in the first place?
- It’s all been done already, hasn’t it? How can you come up with something new?
- What does it mean to write about what you know? How on earth can you write about what you don’t
know?
- What makes a reader care?
The course has a lively, inclusive atmosphere in which discussion and the spirit of engagement foster a supportive and respectful environment. Explorations of technique, process and motivation form a large part of the course. As does reading.
'You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.' – Annie Proulx
With this in mind we'll look at examples of strong, distinctive fiction and at how it can allow us to see the world in new ways. Ways that have been fashioned for us by writers who don’t try to please or persuade, but who put us
where they want us to be. This is the sort of writing that lives in the heads of readers, and that’s the sort of writing
we want to create.
Your own writing will of course be central, and every student will have their own work read by the others, and
will have at least two opportunities to have it discussed in class. These mini-workshops will focus on
imagination and language; perspective and point of view; development of character; shaping of scenes; providing
texture through imagery, detail and atmosphere; and pace, tension and contrast.
By the end of the course you should be beginning to find your feet in fiction. And importantly, they will be your
own feet – the material and style and heart which belong to you. You will have the chance to work on a short story
in an environment where you are taken seriously as a writer.