Date/Time
Date(s) - 31/10/2022 - 19/12/2022
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Sewell Park Academy
On this course, you will learn the methods for building a fictional universe of your own design and how to bring it to life. Discover the elements of speculative fiction and how to incorporate them into world-building on paper through a compelling story. Explore the golden rules of writing science fiction and fantasy to create stories that transport your readers to another dimension.
Week 1: Why Genre?
What is ‘genre fiction’ and why are we drawn to it? We’ll discuss who genre labels are useful for, how we make distinctions between them, and what can happen when those distinctions are blurred.
Week 2: Magic or Technology?
Often magic and technology are what set Fantasy and Sci Fi apart, yet they function very similarly. We’ll consider how to establish the ‘rules’ of your magic and tech as well as explore what happens when magic IS tech and vice versa.
Week 3: Building a World
Perhaps your imagined world is very similar to our own, or maybe it’s completely different. Either way, you need to know how your world works. We’ll consider what it means to create societies with their own belief systems, cultures, politics, history, economics, social structures and geography, and how these will impact your characters and plots.
Week 4: Aliens, Androids, and Wizards, Oh My!
Tropes are often necessary in genre fiction, but how do we avoid letting those tropes turn into stereotypes, especially when we are creating our characters? We’ll spend some time unpicking how to make these tropes work for us and not against us.
Week 5: Strange Worlds; Human Stories
The best genre fiction speaks to real, relevant, human concerns, and features characters we can see ourselves and others in. We’ll focus on the human faults, conflicts and relationships that add depth to our characters and can help us develop organic, connected plots.
Week 6: Why is this Happening?
Sometimes when writing genre fiction, we can spend too much time worrying about what happens and forget to consider why it happens. We’ll consider the differences between ‘story’ and ‘plot’ and how we can build our plots out of our characters’ motivations, actions and needs.
Week 7: A Consideration of Craft
Here we’ll look into the finer crafts of writing solid prose fiction. We’ll consider our individual writers’ voices and how to hone them, as well as dig into the basics of style including syntax, sentence structure and word choice.
Week 8: What Next?
Although there will be a chance to share work each week, this week will be dedicated to sharing what we’ve been working on, giving each other constructive criticism, and discussing possibilities for where this writing might go moving forward.
*Although there will be a chance to share work each week, this week will be dedicated to sharing what we’ve been working on, giving each other constructive criticism, and discussing possibilities for where this writing might go moving forward.
About the tutor:
I am a writer and educator who has been teaching creative writing for over 12 years. I am currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where I earned an MA in Creative Writing: Prose Fiction in 2007, as well as a freelance writing mentor. I have a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice as well as Post Graduate credits in Education Practice and Research, with a special focus in Feminist and other critical pedagogies. My novella, The First Law of Motion, was published in the US by St. Martin’s Press in 2009. Originally from Philadelphia, I now live in Norwich with my partner and four cats.
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Bookings
Bookings are closed for this event.