Masterclass:The Art of the Short Story – Character and Voice with Orfhlaith Foyle
Info
Date: October 4, 2025
Time: 10.30am - 3.30pm
Duration: 4 hours
Level: Intermediate | Beginner |
Cost: €75 (€68 Members)
Location: In-person
This course will take place in-person on Saturday 4 October (4 hours + one hour for lunch) at the Irish Writers Centre.
Course Summary
There is art and craft to writing a short story and for this masterclass participants will concentrate on character and voice via the principles of form and structure, as well as exploring taboos and life observation.
Participants will explore how to step into a story, see and feel what the character feels, develop the character’s voice. Establish sentence rhythm, condense the character’s world into sentence and paragraph, and the varied world of experimental short stories.
There will be a one-hour break for lunch.
Course Outline
This is a workshop and discussion masterclass.
Participants will bring a piece of work, an idea for a character, or simple a sentence that won’t let them go.
- Students will be encouraged to read and discuss their work, never forced.
- Read and discuss the work of short story greats.
- The students will discover and experiment with the varied forms of the short story, via character and voice.
- How to begin: a miniature narrative – over a breakfast table, a monologue – a voice heard from a boat in the lake etc – a description, a setting, an event.
- Where to go from there – character, voice, dialogue – beyond the miniature.
- Experiment – how does character and voice shape your narrative?
Course Outcomes
This masterclass is designed to be challenging but enjoyable. The students will come away with the tools to create a character and voice within a story form.
Biography
Órfhlaith Foyle is a short story writer, poet and dramatist and lives in Galway.
Doire Press published her third collection of short stories Three Houses in Rome September 2023.
Her work has appeared in the London Magazine, The Dublin Review, Wales Arts Review, The Manchester Review, The Stinging Fly, the Gorse journal and various anthologies. She wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia. Both received full BAI funding and premiered on Newstalk Radio in October 2021 and 2023.
Her fourth short story collection PLACES is to be published by Doire Press Autumn 2026
