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Writing from personal experience imbues your work with unique detail and authenticity. But it's all too easy for inexperienced writers to feel apprehensive about sharing their true thoughts and opinions. This highly interactive one-day course offers practical tips to help you start writing your story, focus your narrative and make it interesting and memorable.
Tutor Paul Sochaczewski introduces ten easy-to-digest storytelling principles used by professional writers that make a real difference, including how to plan your project, how to create tension and how to build a relationship with your readers. This workshop explores key points through practical writing tasks, and uses film clips, cartoons, music, NLP exercises and discussions to help stimulate creativity.
By the end of the day you will have begun to write a personal essay, and will leave with the skills and confidence to turn your life experiences into entertaining and thought-provoking articles, travelogues, essays or presentations.
This course is for you if...
- You want to start a blog or essay about your life but don't know where to start
- You're an aspiring journalist or travel writer keen to write about your personal experiences
- You're looking for ways to inject more personality and excitement into your presentations
Course description
This one-day course provides a lively overview of how to write stories based on personal experience, for any print or online format. The day consists of a series of practical exercises – making use of examples of published articles (both good and bad) – multimedia clips and discussions to give attendees a hands-on understanding of how these principles work in practice. Attendees will also have the opportunity to share their work with the group at the end of the course if they wish. Topics covered on the day include:
- Recognising the dynamics of your own hero's journey
- Getting started by writing just one scene
- Avoiding the dreaded 'info dump'
- Creating instant intimacy with the reader
- Keeping your readers hanging on – and turning the pages
- Telling the story by following the Little Red Riding Hood Strategy
- Creating conflict with the Nancy Reagan Principle
- Writing like Steven Spielberg directs
PLEASE NOTE: This is a total immersion course, attendees will be asked to switch off their mobile phones for the duration of the event.
Tutor profile
Paul Sochaczewski is a journalist, author and writing coach. Paul has written for the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal and CNN Traveller among others, and has published eight acclaimed books, including his latest, An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles. Previously head of international campaign development for WWF (the World Wide Fund for Nature), Paul lectures internationally for groups including the Royal Geographical Society and the London School of Economics. Find out more about Paul on his website.
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Details
Date: Saturday 14 March 2015
Times: 10am-4pm. Check-in begins 30 minutes before the start time.
Location: The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU
Price: £249 (includes VAT, booking fee, lunch and refreshments)
Event capacity: 16
To contact us, click here. Terms and conditions can be found here.
Returns policy
Tickets may be refunded if you contact us at least 14 days before the course start date. Please see our terms and conditions for more information on our refund policy.
