New Brewery Arts Workshops

Contact: www.newbreweryarts.org.uk or phone 01285 657181

I have created a series of 10 workshops for the autumn term at New Brewery Arts, Cirencester. The term starts on Thursday 20 Sept 2-4pm and ends on 29 Nov with a half-term break on 25 October.

If you are interested please visit the New Brewery Arts website for details of how to enrol and costs etc.
www.newbreweryarts.org.uk or phone them on 01285 657181

Rona Laycock

Below are details of the workshops

1. Guided writing workshop: We will consider the relationship between fiction and autobiography and the way this relationship adresses the opposing pieces of advice often offered to writers, to write about what you know or to write about what you don’t know. All writers, of course, do both.

2. Remembering and place: a series of exercises – Lost things; lost lands; lost selves etc.

3. Character questions, envelope exercise to create characters, formatting dialogue, cross purposes, vernacular voices.

4. Guided character visualisation. Exploring figures in fiction: The Prospero figure, the flâneur, the beautiful woman.

5. Structure – beginning middle end/ middle beginning end/ end middle beginning; sub-plotting, shuffling.

6. Making the familiar strange: writing using ‘given words’. The story that results from this exercise will then be our given text and we will subject it to other constraints: e.g. using moods as filters for a story.

7. Developing your use of language through an exploration of poetry.

8. Exercises in style. Using headings from Queneau’s Exercises in Style we will subject a short story to a series of re-writing to explore the idea of writing styles.

9. Exploring genre: we will look particularly at the challenges of writing historical, science fiction and fantasy fiction. We will examine the idea that historical fiction helps us to understand the past, science fiction sets the agenda for our future and fantasy helps us to think about the decisions we make now.

10. Revisiting the workshops that we have taken part in this term.

Entry: please visit the New Brewery Arts website for details of costs etc.

Time: 2:00pm