Creative Writing

Course details

Each course is of 5 weeks duration and each one is suitable for beginner and advanced writers. The courses are also suitable for anyone who simply wishes to enhance their general writing skills for blogging, emailing etc. While the emphasis is on enhancing writing skills, it is also about indulging in our love of writing.

Course Content:

Writing: Fiction, Memoir, Travel

We will be looking at how we can make the most of the word, the sentence and the paragraph. We always need to pay close attention to this area of writing, as there is always room for improvement no matter how advanced or unadvanced we think our writing is.           

The three courses can be taken together as a fifteen week writing course, so that the student can keep building up a skills base, and/or so that the student can continue to enjoy the experience. Students might like to consider this as an introduction to FETAC Level 5 Creative Writing which will, if there is enough demand, follow on from this course.

Fiction Writing

With emphasis on the novel and the short story, we will explore how we can make the most of the word, the sentence and the paragraph. We will play with these elements of writing to paint a visual picture, create smells and tastes, and build tension. 

Lots of close reading will be done, of published authors and of the student’s work (with the student’s permission.)             

Memoir Writing

Those who attended “Fiction Writing,” can continue to build upon the skills explored there, and put them to further use in memoir writing. Those who did not attend can begin to build upon the skills they have, be they basic or advanced.   

We will look at our own lives, and build our storylines. There will be lots of emphasis on the senses here - how the senses can spark memories for us, and how we can use them so that readers can see, touch, smell, hear and feel your world.  

Writers can make a blank page smell of a turf fire or the bottom of an old biscuit tin, feel cold and soft as a snowball, taste of sour apple drops …. We will also explore how the surrounding world can be absorbed in memoir writing.   This can be political, social, cultural, economic events in a certain time of the writer’s life, shaping a life in the day of the writer. 

Some writers might just like to keep their memoir simple, just about their own life.

Travel writing

Students may just attend this course and build upon the skills they already have. Other students may have attended the previous writing courses. 

Now those skills can be used on holidays, or just to articulate the beauty of your own local area.  This is particularly useful for writers who want to blog. It can also contribute greatly to memoir writing, or simply private journaling. For fiction writers, this will be an extremely enjoyable and useful subject.

We will look also at vocabulary tailored to the writer’s needs in this area connected with nature, architecture, cityscapes, countryside, food, music, culture etc., 

We will rely very much on visual resources in this course. Again, the senses will be at the forefront because readers like to smell and taste different places as much as have a visual picture created.