WHAT'S ON

Coachhouse Writers are pleased to inform you:

 

Michael W. Thomas

will be delivering a writing course

from 02/10/2007

details follow:

‘What Makes It Tick: Their Writing—and Yours’

In this course, we shall be looking at a variety of writing in all genres. We shall explore and discuss extracts in terms of:
• Their forms and elements of structure;
• The tone of the writing;
• How the various speakers are presented, such as the ‘voice’ in a poem, the narrator of a piece of fiction and the characters in fiction and drama;
• What kind of themes are explored;
• Whether the piece of writing ultimately appeals or not, and possible reasons for its positive, negative or mixed effect on the reader.
We shall also assess the extracts in terms of their potential as sources or starting-points for our own writing. Approaches to this might include
• A continuation of the extract;
• A complementary response to it: for example, you may want to rewrite a prose extract from the viewpoint of your own invented character; you may want to consider the theme of a poem and then write your own version, offering a different, even opposing treatment of the theme; or a particular extract—whether appealing or otherwise—might lead you to explore a related (or unrelated) subject for a completely separate piece of writing;
• You may want to take the theme of an extract in one genre and rework it in another. (For example, Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’ with which we have already worked, might translate into a playscript for two voices, the Duke’s and the emissary’s.);
• You may want to do none of the above—that’s fine, as long as a piece of writing comes out of it.
Extracts:
These will cover all of the literary genres. Typical examples will include:
• Reflective poems by Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats;
• The opening of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf;
• The opening of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald;
• The opening of The Caretaker, Harold Pinter;
• V. S. Naipaul’s story ‘B. Wordsworth’ from his collection Miguel Street; or ‘The Tramp at Piraeus,’ the opening section of his novel, In A Free State.
• Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe;
• A short story by the American writer Raymond Carver.
Members of the group are welcome to bring in copies of their own chosen extracts for discussion.

 

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