My short story writing course (1)
Two and a half months after I registered for the course and having now written nine short stories for my web site, today I started a course in short story writing at the City Lit in central London. The course is from 10.15 am – 12.15 pm each Wednesday for 12 weeks and our tutor is an American called Wendy Brandmark who has published short stories and a novel called “The Angry Gods” (I’ve ordered a copy from Amazon).
There are 21 of us on the course with three times as many women as men. Once we had done the introductions (several teachers and journalists), we were told about the value of “The Writer’s Notebook” for our ideas and reflections (I use the Notes section of my iPhone to record ideas for my stories as soon as I think of them but now I have a physical notebook to use on the course). Our exercise was to picture and describe a character from our life and our homework is to take an object from that description and see if we can develop it into the beginnings of a short story.
I’m sure that the course is really going to help me write better stories but, now that my work has resumed after the summer lull, I won’t be writing as intensely as I have been doing over the summer.