Small Beginnings with Catherine Dunne
Info
Date: April 2, 2026
Time: 2.00 pm - 4.00 pm
Duration: 4 weeks
Level: Advanced | Intermediate | Beginner |
Cost: €160 (€144 Members)
Online/In Person: In Person
This course will take place in person on Tuesdays for 4 weeks beginning 2 April (4 sessions total.)
Course Summary
Graham Swift, in ‘Making an Elephant’, is of the view that ‘A novel is a very big undertaking.’ (but) ‘It grows somehow mysteriously from some small beginning…you are glad that it’s beginning even if it proves to be the wrong thing.’
Novels, stories, plays, poems, memoir – all get written one word at a time, and writers need to develop their own writing rhythm.
During this course, we’ll explore that rhythm, along with examples of characterisation and structure.
We’ll examine the role of inspiration, and nurture that ‘small beginning’ that heralds the process that begins somewhere in the stillness within us.
Course Outline
Week 1: Developing and maintaining the writing rhythm
Week 2: Where do characters come from?
Week 3: Structure
Week 4: Inspiration and the importance of ‘small beginnings’
Participants will be asked to
- engage with the process of creating fictional characters
- craft a number of ‘small beginnings’
Course Outcomes
At the end of this course participants will have:
- An understanding of your own personal writing process
- Created at least one fictional character
- Crafted the ‘small beginnings’ of their own novel
Catherine Dunne is the award winning author of twelve novels, several essays and one work of non-fiction. Her work has been translated into several languages.
Her latest novel, A Good Enough Mother, won the European Rapallo Prize for fiction in November 2023.
She was the recipient of the 2018 Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and is a member of Aosdána.
