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Previous Summer of Writing workshops
These are workshops that have previously run – they will run again if they get voted in. This is how we choose the workshops:
- March: Make your wishes. Add ideas for new workshops you'd like me to create to the wish list. At the end of Feb, I'll collect your requests together with my own ideas and previous workshops, to make a long-list.
- April: Vote for workshops. From the long list of workshops, vote for which ones you'd like me to run. Around the end of April, I choose the 5 workshops with the most votes.
- May to July: Book your workshops. The final 5 workshops are up for you to book your selection. People who added to the wishlist or voted get first dibs on places, as they book up fast!
- August: the Summer of Writing begins!
The writing process
Playful challenging activities based on top research to create new ideas and explore the creative process
Hands-on practical strategies to manage the process of planning a novel, whether you’re starting from scratch or reworking raw draft
Once your first draft is done, what do you do? Practical tips on how to redraft, refine, and edit your story or novel
How to present your writing for publication: where to send it, sort your layout, write synopses and cover letters, and get published
Aspects of craft
Explore a range of ways to write characters unlike yourself and vary a story's cast, while you develop new characters to take home with you
Everything from developing your characters’ voices and natural speech to layout and seamless attribution
Writing with fresh angles, new voices, unusual points of view, experimental structures and different styles
Explore what makes quality prose, from Angela Carter’s richness to Margaret Atwood’s restraint, and hone your own style
Create stories through multiple perspectives, hone their points of view, and use shifts to delight the reader
Use a character’s voice to narrate the story, play with their limits, and keep the story vivid
Move your characters and the reader easily in time & place, and deal deftly with exposition and back story
How to keep the reader reading – whether you’re writing literary fiction or a pot-boiler thriller
How to choose powerful locations, create action from the setting, write description with strong narrative purpose, and enhance your descriptive writing
Using tropes and archetypes effectively, avoiding cliché, and the fun of subversion
How to balance the different ingredients of a scene and ways of approaching the “big scenes” in your story
Genres and forms
Strategies and technques for creating powerful short stories of any genre, and extreme economy in storytelling
How to create convincing romantic relationships that matter to the plot and to the reader
Explore the haunted tropes and high drama of the Gothic genres and ways to put your own unique spin on them
Explore magical realism’s features, whip up reams of ideas, and start writing your own magical realist pieces
Explore the essentials of poetry through the liberating lens of poems as gifts
Tell stories through poems, use musicality to make them memorable, and keep them lively, for children, teens, and adults
How to balance suspense, secrets, and clues in thrillers, mysteries, and crime/detective fiction
* Add to the workshop wishlist *
If you don't have anything for the wishlist but you want updates about the workshops, you can join the mailing list.
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I won't share your email with anyone else. You'll get emails from me only: the latest news on courses and workshops, priority booking for courses and workshops (new workshops fill up especially fast), the opportunity to join writing groups or put up a listing for your own, free writing skills, and new blog posts if you ticked that.