The Writer’s Workbench with Aiden O’Reilly
Info
Date: January 18, 2022
Time: 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm
Duration: 6 weeks
Level: Beginner |
Cost: €165 (€150 Members)
Course Summary
Writing is a craft and this course puts a whole toolbox of techniques and styles at your service. You’ll try out a few of them and each student will find what works best for their purposes. There are two sides to writing fiction: creativity, and the process of giving shape. You will have exercises in creativity, and also exercises in writing material to a specific style or voice. Some of the mechanics of dialogue, description, and POV will be covered. There will be a particular emphasis on editing.
Course Outline
Week 1: Note-taking, inspiration, glimmers
Week 2: Embodied and dynamic description, effective dialogue
Week 3: Reading like a writer, styles
Week 4: Plot and structure
Week 5: Editing, punctuation pitfalls
Week 6: Developing voice
Participants will do short writing exercises in class which they can then email to the teacher.
They will also complete a longer piece which will be used in the editing class week 5.
Course Outcomes
Participants will dip into the Writers’ Toolbox and stretch their writing muscles in new directions.
Aiden O’Reilly’s debut short story collection Greetings Hero was published in 2014. He studied mathematics, and has worked as a translator, a building-site worker, an IT teacher, and a property magazine editor. He won the biannual McLaverty award, and his fiction and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Litro Magazine, The Missouri Review, the Winter Papers, the DRB, and many other places.
