Backbone and Heart: Writing a Short Story with Órfhlaith Foyle

Course Summary

A six-week course covering what it takes to write a story, long or short, with the aim of writing a story. How does a story begin?  What makes a story? How do you write a story? How does a story flow? How do you ensure your writing has guts and backbone or is that necessary for a story?

Explore the essential passion/need to create a story and analyse the technicalities of writing it.

Each week we will focus on the different aspects that bring a short story to ‘life’.

Course Outline

Before each workshop, students will be advised to read a chosen short story

Week One

The Beginning

What creates a story? Who are the writers you read? What do they say? How do you create the main character? What is ‘Voice’ and narrative distance/POV? Protagonist and Antagonist. Individual work on students’ own stories – their projected aims for their stories. Stories – chosen from contemporary Irish and other literary journals including the workshop participants’ own choices.

Week Two 

Body and Character -Continuation of Week One

How does a story come to you? The first line and the first paragraph, and the next paragraph. How a story’s character precipitates action, confrontation, description. Pros and cons of outlining a story – short and long; Flash, Narrative Poems, etc. Writers Lucia Berlin, Clarice Lispector, also see writers in Week Three.

Group work on the above.

Week Three

Voice, Narrative and Dialogue

What is frightful about writing a story? What do you tell and what do you leave out? What does a story’s voice promise the reader? Are voice and character necessary in a story? Location and time? Descriptive writing, dialogue. The writer’s voice. The narrator’s voice. Writing styles.

Group work with emphasis on how fear can energise your story. What does your character want? What is your character terrified of? What are you afraid of  for the character; for your writing? Stories from Claire Keegan, Alan MacMonagle, Flannery O’ Connor, Samanta Schweblin etc.

Week Four

Truth and Imagination

What is the point of writing a story? Is your story emotionally ‘true’? Can imagination be as true as experience? How do you write subtext into your story? A look at writers whose first work, novels etc – who build their work from truth and imagination. Also how our stories are us no matter how different the character, dialogue and narrative. We write out of ourselves and in service to the story. Writers Carson McCullers, Imbolo Mbue, William Trevor, James Baldwin and writers who delve far into their imagination, Ursula le Guin, Shirley Jackson, Hiromi Kawakami, Lafcadio Hern and others.

A closer look at individual’s work with group/pair work. How much of you is in your work and why is that imperative when writing fictional work?

Week Five 

Danger and Story.

What can be dangerous about a story? The words you use, your writing style, what your story says and how it says it?  A writer has every right to write. Discuss. Also cliché, stereotypes, archetypes, themes may have a place in stories but only if shown for what they are.

What do you want your story to say? What does it say? Does it follow its own truth? Does it follow its narrative line? How does it End?

How does a writer remain committed to writing their work? A look at writers who do not avoid asking questions in their work aka Richard Flanagan, Toni Morrison; writers who face the abyss within and outside themselves – Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett among others.

Group work and individual work on dangerous stories and story endings.

Week Six

A recap of the previous weeks work and group work. Students discuss the evolution of their stories over the past workshops, and if they feel their story is ready – how to approach a publisher.

Group work on approaching a publisher. Expectations, rejections and acceptance.

Course Outcomes

At the end of the six weeks, each student will have:

• Explored the many-sided passions and necessary elements in various stories.
• Discover what makes them a writer who writes.
• Completed their own story’s first/second /third draft.
• Considered their approach to a publisher.

Órfhlaith Foyle is a short story writer, poet, dramatist, and lives in Galway. Doire Press will publish her third collection Three Houses in Rome in September 2023.

She wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia, both adapted from her short fiction. Both received full BAI funding and premiered on Newstalk Radio in October 2021 and 2023.

Órfhlaith received a full Arts Council Agility Award in 2021 to complete a first draft of Three Houses in Rome and was awarded a full Arts Council Literary Bursary in 2022 for her next work.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.