Course Summary: This six week series of interactive short story workshops will help you hone your skills when it comes to writing short form prose. Specifically geared towards emerging short story writers, each week, facilitator Jan Carson will present a short talk and lead participants through a series of writing exercises particularly focused upon short fiction. The course will also give each participant the opportunity to workshop a short story of their own.
Course Outline: Each two and a half hour session of this bespoke workshop series will include a short talk covering themes and topics key to short story writing. The course will cover concision, editing, character, plotting and structure, and include a session on preparing your stories for publication. Plenty of time will be set aside for questions and discussion.Each week participants will also be asked to engage in a series of short interactive writing exercises, linked to the topic of the week. Suggestions for homework assignments will be given though participants should feel under no obligation to carry these out.The final section of each session will be given over to workshopping a short piece of fiction. All participants will be expected to both contribute a 2,000 word section of one of their own short stories and also read and offer feedback on the other participants’ work.
When booking for the course, please include 2,000 words of the short story which you’d like the class to offer feedback on.
At the end of the course Jan will provide all participants with a suggested reading list.
Course Outcomes: This course will be a great opportunity to meet other short story writers, develop your writing skills, learn about opportunities for publishing and receive structured feedback on a work in progress. It will also be a lot of fun.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in 2019. It won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019.