Whose story is it anyway?
I am delighted to be facilitating a
week-long short story workshop from Saturday 5 to Saturday 12 September, 2015
in the stunning setting that is Anam Cara Writers’ Retreat Centre on the Beara
peninsula in west Cork, Ireland.
By its very nature, the literary
short story is character-driven. It is about landing your protagonists in a
predicament and watching how they will free themselves from it. What happens to
them as the story progresses depends solely on what you discover about them as
you go along, how you bring them and your readers from a state of ignorance to
a state of awareness.
It is up to
the writer to select the right character for readers to invest their interest
in, as well as the most appropriate person to tell the story. They are not
always the same thing and it is the specific method of revealing the characters
you are writing about that allows the reader to see and hear what is going on
in the narrative. Therefore the right voice is crucial to its success.
Each day a
different element will be explored in order to build on the previous lesson
that will support you in completing a draft of your story to include:
- Beginnings: How to grab your reader by the throat.
- Whose story is it anyway?
- Characters: What makes them breathe?
- Dialogue: What role does it play, if any? How does it move the story along?
- Epiphany, endings: As important as beginnings. Does every word earn its place on the page?
Using various prompts to
liberate ideas, each morning session will explore one of the above elements as
well as in-class exercises. Afternoons will include one-to-one sessions and
review of work.
Day by day, you will add to your
previous learning experience, rewriting where necessary to fill out the
narrative, thus moving the story forward. As a writer it is crucial to know
these elements and in rewriting, ascertain which areas work and which do not;
to learn the importance of layering; to know the pulse of a story. By the end of the week you will have produced a
story full of craft and risk-taking.
For further information go to:
Geraldine Mills
Biographical Note
Geraldine Mills is a
poet and short fiction writer. She has had two collections of poetry published
by Bradshaw Books, Unearthing your Own (2001)
and Toil the Dark Harvest (2004)
Arlen House has published her short story collections Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The
Weight of Feathers (2007) for which she was awarded an Arts Council
Bursary. She is a recipient of a
Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her third poetry collection An Urgency of Stars published by Arlen
House in 2010. Her most recent short story collection Hellkite was published by Arlen House in 2014.
She has won numerous
awards for her fiction, including the OKI Award, the Moore Medallion and the RTÉ
Guide/Penguin Short Story Competition. . She was the Millennium winner of the Hennessy/Tribune Emerging
Fiction Award and the overall winner of the New Irish Writer Award for her
story ‘Lick of the Lizard’.
In 2011 she toured the
United States where she launched a poetry collaboration with New England poet,
Lisa C. Taylor, titled ‘The Other Side of
Longing (Arlen House 2011) and presented the prestigious Gerson Reading at
the University of Connecticut. Her short story collections have been taught at
the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University.
She is a fiction
mentor with NUI Galway and is an online tutor in the short story with Creative
Writing Ink. The Arts Council awarded her a second bursary in September 2014 to
work on short fiction. Her first children’s novel Gold will be published by Little Island in 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment