I’ve Started, so I’ll Finish: Write a Short Story with Aingeala Flannery

Course Summary

How many times have you started but not completed a short story? This interactive workshop is designed to kickstart your story and get it over the finishing line. Examine and learn from some of the greatest short stories ever written. Complete in-class writing exercises. Give and get weekly feedback on your story in progress from fellow students and from the course facilitator; award-winning short story writer and novelist, Aingeala Flannery.

Please note you are asked to share work and feedback with others throughout this course.

Course Outline

Each week will begin with discussion and close reading of a great short story (or novel opening), which the facilitator will email to you in advance of class.

Using what you’ve learnt as a prompt, you will work on your story in progress for a timed ‘writing burst’.

In advance of each class, two participants will email their story to the group, and each will receive 15-20 minutes of moderated peer feedback in class.

Participants will have the opportunity to read from their work in the final class (optional).

Course Outcomes

Participants will receive professional and peer feedback on a short story they’ll complete by the end of the course. They will learn how to read like a writer, how to give and accept respectful and constructive feedback. There will be an opportunity to read work aloud for those who want it.

Aingeala Flannery is the author of The Amusements, which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the John McGahern Prize. Aingeala was a winner in The Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2018. Her work has been published in The Irish Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Paper Visual Art (PVA) and The Winter Papers, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One for the Francis MacManus Competition and on Sunday Miscellany. She’s the 2024 Arts Council Writer in Residence at DCU.