Week 7: Point of View / Entry 1 [4th November 2020]

Taylor Swift released an album in summer called ‘folklore’, in which three songs are all interlinked, and they speak from differing perspectives but tell the same story. These songs are Betty, Cardigan and August. Many of the lines interlink as they tell the story about a boy cheating on his girlfriend, for example: “remember when I pulled up and

Random Writing – could be good in a story

She was a good person and he was a guilty man. But they were in love, so that was that. She existed as an in-between anomaly of wise and utterly idiotic; she had faced true darkness but never wavered, not in the end. She struggled, she was sad often, and sometimes she did not care

Week 5: Objects and How They Create Meaning / Entry 2 [22nd October 2020]

Exercise: think of a character who has a particular skill in using or making something. It could be cellist, a potter, a lumberjack, a car mechanic etc — so many of our lives are/ used to be connected with physical things.  Take this person and their skill into a situation in which they have to use

Week 5: Objects and How They Create Meaning / Entry 1 [21st October 2020]

Think of: the conch or the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies; think of the two stones at the end of last week’s story ‘Love Many’.   Henry James : “the air of reality seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel” – grounding the story, you want to feel that characters

Week 4: Digging Deeper / Entry 1 [12th October 2020]

(hospital week) Notes on Enest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place –  I love the dialogue in this, and especially the theme of life as nothingness. I love the idea that we are meaningless beings, although I can empathise as to why this can lead to an element of despair. The phrase “Our nada who art in

Week 3: Character / Entry 2 [7th October 2020]

In Dubliners by James Joyce – which also happens to be my favourite book – Joyce uses free indirect discourse to introduce certain elements of his characters. For example, in the final story of the book, he uses the phrase “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet”. The use of the word “literally” shows

Week 3: Character / Entry 1 [6th October 2020]

Consider whether or not you agree with these ideas:  Character isn’t a static thing; who we are is revealed through the way in which we respond to people and things. Personality and characteristics stay the same, traits of a character can change. People grow and learn, but ultimately who they are at heart sits beneath

Week 2: Place and Setting / Entry 4 [3rd October 2020]

I was in such a buoyant mood the other day after having written the happy scene of Abigail’s room, that I did not want to have to explore the rest of the house just yet. Yet, recently, my house and I have been watching horror movies to entertain ourselves during lockdown, and I have been

Week 2: Place and Setting / Entry 3 [2nd October 2020]

Eudora Welty (short story writer) believed stories would be completely different if were set elsewhere – this gave me the idea to write two stories with the same plotline but with different settings and see what happens? I did this with immediate writing, which we do at the beginning of our seminars regularly, to make it a

Week 2: Place and Setting / Entry 2 [1st October 2020]

In our seminar, we explored the difference between place and setting.  Setting: specific location, eg. The room where the story is set Place: broader term, macro-level totality of different locations in the same place, geographically united can evoke a sense of cultural understanding Hilary Mantel – if a description is coloured by the narration of the