The Building Blocks of Fiction: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Caroline Green

Course Summary

This five-week course is aimed at anyone who would love to write fiction but doesn’t know where to start. With a focus on longer stories, it will comprise a combination of expert tuition, writing exercises and carefully selected extracts. Covering everything from crafting compelling, three-dimensional characters to understanding basic plotting and making a story rich and descriptive, it will offer the fundamental skills you need to write your own novel.

Course Outline

Strong characters are the core of all good fiction and for a novel, they need to feel authentic enough to drive the story and keep your reader gripped throughout. You’ll spend two weeks learning how to develop characters from scratch and gain an understanding of how point-of-view can best bring out their ‘voices’. After this you will look into story structure and how to avoid a book that sags in the middle or runs out of steam before the end. In the final two weeks you will explore how setting and description bring all of this to life, so your novel remains compelling from start to finish. There is no submitted work, but classes will involve sharing in small groups.

Course Outcomes

You will come away with the confidence to start your own novel and feel equipped in the basic tools of writing fiction.

An award-winning, Sunday Times/ USA Today bestselling author for both adults and young people, Caroline Green has published thirteen books; under her own name, as Cass Green and as CS Green. Her latest is the supernatural thriller DOWN AMONG THE DEAD. Caroline is the Writer in Residence at East Barnet School and Thameside Prison.

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