18 July 2005
A course ...
Greg and I - I said glibly - are teaching a weekend course in creative writing at West Dean College. So someone wrote to me to ask:
What is a creative writing course?
First of all, you gather together a group of people determined and courageous enough to share their experience and inexperience, their doubts and self-belief. Then you structure a sequence of tasks designed to illustrate tips to follow, traps to avoid.
This one was sold out and it was on:
- plot and character
It began with a drink in the bar - I recommend a bottle of Chablis and get Peter the barman to keep it in his fridge - and a good dinner on Friday night.
Then a one-hour session on opening paragraphs, looking at early clues given in a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction books to character, style, atmosphere and genre. Then back to the bar because it's July and it's hot. Then bed.
Day two, Saturday. Meet at breakfast. Chat about this and that. Reorganise the room into different groups and into session one on believable, three-dimensional protagonists. How to create them and how to maintain their individuality and integrity while you are writing.
Break for coffee. Sometimes the smokers are the last back. Then session three, creating small snatches of plot that grow out of the interaction of the characters created in the last session.
Then lunch. If you shared your bottle of wine last night, get Pete to put another one in the fridge for this evening.
At two o'clock, back into the vast teaching room for a demonstration of story-building from Greg and our teaching partner this weekend - Jason Goodwin - projected from the laptop onto the huge white wall of the ballroom. Then ...
... at three thirty the participants go their separate ways with a request to write a scrap of fiction of between 200 and 500 words. (Some will do more, none will do less.) And because these scraps of fiction all share a small number of well-defined locations, they will cross-over and interlock like the broken fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope.
Dinner at seven.
'How did you get on?' 'OK, I think.' 'I don't know, really.' 'Very well, excellent!'
Then a ninety minute session at which everyone reads their new-minted text. Marvellous. So varied, so original, so full of strong independent voices and personal experiences.
Then, if you have any energy left, a quick drink and bed.
Sunday morning, last day. Breakfast. Ah, good, scrambled egg. And a few insightful remarks about last night's stories. Then back to the ballroom and another arrangement of tables.
Greg tells a story, based on characters he first heard about last night. Ken, the detective, in over his head, invented by Freda. Michael, the murderous copper, invented by Dan. And he combines them into a single tale in which their divergent personalities determine how each behaves and bring them into conflict ... Then he asks the participants in groups of three to do the same with other characters and situations.
And the results are quite brilliant.
Break for coffee. Come back and polish the new double stories. Turn the desks round and share them with the adjacent group of three.
Then devise an unexpected twist and challenge the adjacent team to incorporate it into their story ...
... and the last teaching session. A short, inventive brainstorm based on a set of atmospheric photographs from the 1940s, various members of the same family, including the twin girls and the little boy you can see alongside this text.
Lunch. Drain the bottle into two or three new friends' glasses.
Two o'clock, final session. Question and answer on the nuts and bolts of the publishing trade, editors, agents and scouts, advances and royalties, genres, short stories, poems and novels.
Three thirty, close. Thanks for coming. No really. That was a marvellous course. Well done all of you. Hope to see you again soon.
All are welcome in the Labyrinth.
