Write, write, write

Many of our writing sessions involve generating new text to prompts from Shelley. You have the opportunity to share your piece aloud to the group. It’s not compulsory. Feedback is provided by Shelley and if you’ve not read, Shelley's happy to read privately and provide comments.

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In sharing your writing with each other the writer and the group can see what really works in a piece and how they might use a particular technique in their next piece. Each element is designed to heighten writing skills as well as deepen the ways to look at and render, the world around you.

Alongside the daily freewriting exercises and other writing activities are session of instruction on writing craft and also an introduction to self-editing. While the focus for the week is writing, I know how vital the rewrite is. So you’ll be introduced to techniques to see how to make your writing ‘just right’ - let's call it the 'Goldilocks factor': Not too long or too short; not too flat or too lumpy; not clichéd or, heaven forbid, dull.

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Writers who are attuned to their senses are able to excite the same interest and inspiration in their readers.

A sense a day

Each day we’ll focus on a different sense with immersion in exercises and activities that bring these to the fore. You’ll be attuned to noticing in a new way; as you begin to write, to render your responses to these new experiences. With that, you'll start building your own lexicon — a rich list of words, associations, vocabulary that is uniquely yours. It's this particular word choice and sentence form that is a great part of what stamps and distinguishes your writing voice from another.

Each day you'll:

• have the guidance, support you need and unfettered time to harness a raft of new writing skills.

• be guided to notice, extract detail and describe so you can convey fresh, rich ideas and images.

• learn to create specific, strong, clear, evocative images.

• place your words, in the right places, in stories that endure.

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You’ll have an entire week of abundant guidance and support from a mentor with decades of experience.

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Writing well is a seduction, really, and we’ll guide you to create pieces readers will fall in love with. It's this writing that readers want, that keeps them reading and recalling (often long after they've turned the last page or clicked the last screen!). [1] 

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[1] There is a new term in the literary world. It’s ‘biblio-adultery’. This is the affliction of still being in love with the characters and setting of the book you’ve just finished reading, while beginning a new book and being drawn to a whole new world. It really is a thing!