Writing Right. Right?

I plan to run a creative writing course in the New Year.

It's a bold step for one who is, as yet, unpublished but one I am looking forward to. I already have five people who are interested in joining. And having given the idea much thought, I am reasonably confident I can make a success of it.

My intention is to run it much like a seminar as I expect to learn as much as anyone who attends. The plan is to split the sessions, an hour and a half to two hours long, into three parts.

The first third will concentrate on the development of literature for the reason I believe it important a writer knows the place from which s/he is writing, historically and philosophically. So we will discuss a given text to determine what the attitudes of the period were and what the author believed was then possible to achieve in their writing. Thus we will move from the omnipotent narrator through modernism to post-modernism and on to contemporary genres of writing.

The second third will focus on their own writing. Each week I will set a technical exercise on some aspect of writing, which we will have discussed in the last third of the previous week's seminar. I will be attempting to stretch their understanding of how they can create different effects with words. Later we will look at all the components that make a good story; openings, conflict, rhythm, structure, et cetera.

It is a little loose at the moment but I have yet to work through the detail of the complete course. I also want to be flexible and allow them to dictate - to a degree - how the course develops.

I was going to blog of this later; however, I was prompted to write of it now by Nicola Morgan's post on The Really Very Simple Theory of Being Published; more specifically by her mention of Stephen King's On Writing, a book I have been looking for and have finally been forced to buy from Amazon (which annoys me given the percentage they take and the threat they represent to independent book shops).