Story: The Essentials, with Gavin McCrea

Course Summary

Stories are everywhere: in novels, films, television series, advertisements, computer games, social media… We all make use of stories every day and our lives are shaped by stories. Not only do we tell stories, but stories tell us who we are (and who we were, and who we would like to be). There are few aspects of life which are not bound up with strategies and effects of story.

But what is story? How does it function? What are its essential characteristics?

Course Outline

The class will take place on Zoom. We will meet every Wednesday morning at 10am (Irish time) for six weeks, from 7 January to 11 February 2026. Each seminar will be two hours long. The seminars will be structured in the following way:

1. The first 30 minutes will be spent informally sharing our writing experiments (homework).
2. The following 60 minutes will be spent performing close textual analyses of a short story or novel extract.
3. The final 30 minutes will be spent performing writing exercises based on the themes of our analyses. Students will be expected to work on these experiments (expand them and/or edit them) as homework. Students will then share these experiments with the class via Moodle.

Each week of the course, we will focus on a specific theme essential to understanding story:

Week One: Beginnings

Week Two: Consciousness

Week Three: Secrets

Week Four: Voices

Week Five: Desire

Week Six: Endings

Participants do not need to purchase any books. All required course materials will be shared (in PDF format) before the relevant class.

Course Outcomes

Each week, in addition to reading, we will perform a series of writing experiments. These experiments will spring from our in-class textual analyses. For example, having spent time in class looking at how the writer constructs a specific transition between the narrative present and the narrative past, we might set ourselves the task of writing a short piece of prose containing a similar kind of transition. We will be invited to share our experiments in class. Here, the idea is to show our writing in a raw state, as fragments that have yet to be built upon or integrated into larger narrative bodies.

Rather than workshopping each other’s work in a formal manner, we will be analysing specific literary techniques, generating new material, experimenting, trying things out, failing, and failing again – without the pressure of having to develop our experiments further or present them to our peers for critique. This is our space to play.

Gavin McCrea was born in Dublin in 1978. He is the author of the novels Mrs Engels (2015), The Sisters Mao (2021), and Rousseau’s Lost Children (2026), and the memoir Cells (2022). His work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Walter Scott Prize. His articles have appeared in The Paris Review, The Dublin Review, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Lithub and Catapult.

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