OK, it’s been a little bit quiet around here during the summer, but I’m excited to be writing again and I hope I’ve learned some new skills!
This summer, I attended Tom Vowler’s online writing course, which I’m happy to recommend. The course format was six weekly 1-hour group meetings, a one-to-one session to ask questions or discuss personal writing goals, group feedback and discussions, and lots of background reading and exercises (as much as you can fit in, honestly).
Each week we received a set of course materials and links exploring various components of fiction-writing — including plenty of reading recommendations, from Chekhov and Gosgol through Hemingway, Barthelme and Kincaid, to contemporary fiction by TC Boyle, Kevin Barry, Tom Vowler’s own work, and many more. Attendees were invited (without pressure) to write sections of a story / several stories (we could choose how we wanted to play it), editing each week in relation to aspects such as sentence structure, POV, tense, cadence, narration and dialogue, exposition and so on.
There were friendly group exercises, dissection of published works, and peer critique (from draft 1, gulp!) It was really fun, massively helpful, and I was sorry when the course ended as I would have loved to have progressed both my own work and the study.
Now, throughout the autumn, I’ll be revisiting my course notes while writing new material (an continuing a very-long-term WIP). I’m excited to see where this might take me, and also pretty sure that I’ll be looking to study further in 2024.
TM Upchurch 