This writing course, Creativity for Writers with Hilary Bell, will be held at Writing NSW in Sydney.

It’s a brand-new year, and the perfect opportunity to rejuvenate your creative writing practice! You’ve got the itch to write something, but where do you start? You have a big idea, but what’s the story? Or maybe you’ve got no ideas at all, just the urge to write: So what can you do?

The premise of this course with Hilary Bell is that you only need to find an entry point, through which you can access the idea that’s inside you. The more entry points we have to choose from, the better. This course is designed to help you create characters, narrative ideas, conflicts, stakes, scenes, and even complete outlines, each one being a portal into a potential new work.

After beginning with a warm-up, every session will use a different stimulus leading to a piece of writing. These stimuli range from photographs to household objects, memories to fairy-tales, random instructions to the world of the senses. By the end of the course, you’ll have the kernels of at least six new ideas.

Course Outline

Week 1: We will use an image to create the world of the story, as well as characters, conflicts and stakes.

Week 2: Focusing on character, writers will find the unique and surprising voices inside everyday objects.

Week 3: From instructions chosen blindly by each writer, a random ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘under what conditions’ become the foundations of a scenario.

Week 4: Given a brief but detailed mental image, we will follow impulse to create a scene, and then use our analytical/critical brain to refine and revise.

Week 5: We’ll use a well-known myth or fairy-tale as a springboard for a new story, through inversion, subversion, mash-ups, contemporising, reinterpretation…

Week 6: Wild card! We’ll keep our final session free for requests, including the possibility of looking at how to develop an idea started during the course.

Participant Requirements

Pen and paper and/or a fully charged device.

This workshop is about creating new work from scratch every week, so it’s not the space for developing one idea over time, nor for bringing along works-in-progress.

Is this course right for you? Read out FAQs>

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