Course Information

Creative writing. Express yourself with the written word.

This writing course offers you a rich immersion in creative nonfiction, practical tuition and instruction in composition and style, along with plenty of opportunities to write and be inspired. You’ll learn how to approach nonfiction with imagination, discipline and lyricism. The course explores the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction and the meanings of real and truthful. It encourages writers to understand nonfiction as literature and shows them how to employ imagination, discipline, creativity and lyricism in its composition, just as one would in fiction. Although a work of nonfiction can be every bit as literary in its distinction and design as a novel, nonfiction cleaves to the actual – something that places a heavy burden of truth-telling upon the writer and reorients imagination from invention to witness.

Outcomes

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

• discover the material in your life and world that calls you to write about it
• practise writing non-fiction prose in different genres – essay, memoir, feature journalism, blog, history, travel
• make of the life you lead, the thoughts you think, the places and things you know, works told as freshly and vividly as the best fiction
• grow good ideas and arrange life experiences into finished works of literary art
• apply time-honoured techniques and insights to take you writing from good to great and make it into a work that may touch and change others’ lives.

Content

• Foundations
• Approach
• Writing practice
• The literature of witness and attention
• The language of solid ground
• Nonfiction as literature
• Essays
• Principles of writing well
• The elements of style
• Words and music
• The importance of place
• Form and structure
• Planning
• Coherence
• Writing with your reader in mind
• Getting started
• Carrying on
• The ethics of nonfiction
• Editing and finishing
• Fourteen troublesome words and phrases

Intended audience

Suitable for anyone wanting to write well about the world we inhabit, the things we know - from family history to politics, from sport to philosophy, from self-help to biography and travel.

Deliver modes

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

Delivery style

This 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 participants to write each week and receive tutelage and feedback from the facilitator and fellow participants.

Materials

Course notes are distributed electronically using Dropbox.