Tuesday Evenings, 7:00 to 9:00

The Yateley Centre

This relaxed and stress-free course for beginners is designed to extract maximum enjoyment from the reading and writing of novels and short stories. We will discuss the elements of creative writing, stimulated by reading a range of extracts written by established authors of novels and short stories.  Workshops include practical work and feedback on characterisation, description of environment or setting, and dialogue, as well as comparing the strengths and weaknesses of first, second and third person narration. The class will provide a supportive critical forum in which students’ creative skills will flourish.

Each lesson is  structured as two fifty-minute workshops, with a short break. For the first workshop, we will explore one aspect of prose writing. For the second workshop, we will read and comment constructively on some of the short passages written, as homework, by members of the group. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion!

By the end of the first short course, students will each have produced one complete short story.