Creative Writing for Absolute Beginners Booster with Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Course Summary

Please note this is a booster programme for participants who’ve completed Creative Writing for Absolute Beginners with Sarah Moore Fitzgerald.

Course Outline

• Session 1 – Personality and writing – understanding your own patterns and preferences as a writer and applying this to your writing routines and strategies.
• Session 2 – The elements of eloquence: exploring rhetoric and language with a particular focus on enhancing and developing writing excellence
• Session 3 – Writing together, keeping ourselves focused, making progress and checking in: a three hour structured writing blitz
• Session 4: Grit and resilience – responding to disappointment, rejection, doldrums and knockbacks.
• Session 5 – Learning from the greats – extracting lessons from our favourite books to enhance and developing our own writing

Course Outcomes

A strong focus on making real time progress on writing (in class) will be adopted throughout this booster course.

Sarah Moore Fitzgerald is an award winning teacher and writer based at the University of Limerick where she’s currently Director of the MA in Creative Writing and of UL’s Creative writing Winter School. She’s the author of seven novels for children and young adults including The Apple Tart of Hope, All The Money in The World and The Shark and The Scar. She’s been nominated for many literary awards, including the Waterstone’s Prize, The Irish Book Awards, The Calderdale Prize and Scotland’s Red Prize for children’s fiction. More recently she has begun historical fiction for adults, and in 2022 she won The London Magazine’s Award for with a piece entitled ‘Matamoros. July 1846’.

She’s a founding member of Limerick’s writing co-operative, ‘Writepace’ and leader of a community project called ‘Walls of Limerick’ which offers mentoring and professional development to writers from disadvantaged, marginalised or under-represented groups. An expert in the psychology of creativity, Sarah shares insights and principles on this theme to support writers in the development of their work.