When: 19-30 September 2010
Where: Palestine
Details:
The Palestine Writing Workshop
05 Writer in Residence Workshop
With Robin Yassin Kassab
About the Palestine Writing Workshop: The Workshop is the first programme in Palestine to offer emerging writers a structured curriculum and community to develop as creative writers. The objective of the Workshop is to target, encourage, and train aspiring writers, to provide them with a set of transferable skills to support their artistic and intellectual writing capacity, to build a community of emerging Palestinian writers, and to identify new talents. Training through a range of courses and workshops across all writing genres (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, life-writing, spoken word, critical writing, writing for income) and skills, the Workshop plans to offer a structured diploma-granting track that is also available for auditing. In its first programme period, the Workshop currently offers Writer in Residence Workshops, one off trainings, and community building events and activities. The Workshop looks beyond academe and seeks to empower aspiring writers throughout the country, giving them the tools to creatively express and develop their inner thoughts and experiences.
About Writer in Residence Workshops: A core part of the Palestine Writing Workshop, well-known and distinguished visiting writers facilitate 20-hour genre-based workshops. Students take the workshops over a period that ranges from 1-3 weeks, after which they receive a certificate of completion. These workshops provide students with unique and invaluable trainings with published writers and are instrumental in unleashing creative potential and the development of writing skills.
Course Title: Writing Fiction: Focus on the Writer, Character in Context, and Plot.
Description: This workshop will focus primarily on the discipline of being a writer and the lifestyle and behaviour that enables writing. It will ask participants to examine the complementary aspects of a writer's personality - the creator and the editor, the initiator and the critic. It will develop fluency through in-class writing exercises. The course also looks at how to create fiction characters within a specific and believable context, and will study the bare bones of the 'seven basic plots' which crop up again and again in stories across genres and cultures. This last point should benefit participants in their literature and culture studies as well as in their creative writing. Ultimately the training provides an introduction upon which students can build in other workshops.
About the Instructor: Robin Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, a novel published by Penguin in 2008, and co-editor of www.pulsemedia.org. He has worked as a journalist and an English teacher in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Suadi Arabia and Oman and was a participant in the 2009 Palestine Festival of Literature. Robin’s blog is www.qunfuz.com.
Ideal class size: 8-12 students. Creative writing classes require small classes so that individuals receive feedback on their writing and concepts.
Language: The teaching language will be English, so participants should have advanced English speaking and listening skills. The instructor will ask participants to do some writing in class, but these exercises will be quick responses and do not need to be read out. They’re are not expected to be of literary quality. Therefore it isn’t a problem if a participant does not have great writing skills in English. Lessons learnt/ skills developed in class can be applied to fiction writing in Arabic as much as in English.
Although participants will not be expected to share any writing unless they wish to, they will be expected to discuss their own experience and ideas. The class will be a collaborative effort.
Objectives
To achieve the discipline of daily writing practice. To achieve fluency.
To ‘know yourself’. Thinking about belief and perspective. Thinking about the writer’s relationship with books, voices and rhythms.
To develop the (split) personality of a writer; to understand the different roles of the conscious critic and the unconscious child.
To create characters in their full context – psychological, social, political, historical.
To examine the ‘seven basic plots’.
Pre-course task: First Thing Writing
To set aside 15 to 45 minutes FIRST THING each morning and to write automatically. Write about the first thing that comes into your mind – your dreams, your hopes for the day, a memory, something that’s worrying you, a description of what you see from your bed. Anything. Do this every morning. Do not try to make your writing good. Keep your writing, but do not re-read it.
The following books (among others) will be referred to during the course. It is not necessary to buy or read them:
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker
The Rabbit novels by John Updike
Life and Fate by Wassily Grossman
The Harafeesh by Naguib Mahfouz
The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim
One copy of each will be present in the class.
Schedule: 20 hours over 10 days
More information here.
Where: Palestine
Details:
The Palestine Writing Workshop
05 Writer in Residence Workshop
With Robin Yassin Kassab
About the Palestine Writing Workshop: The Workshop is the first programme in Palestine to offer emerging writers a structured curriculum and community to develop as creative writers. The objective of the Workshop is to target, encourage, and train aspiring writers, to provide them with a set of transferable skills to support their artistic and intellectual writing capacity, to build a community of emerging Palestinian writers, and to identify new talents. Training through a range of courses and workshops across all writing genres (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, life-writing, spoken word, critical writing, writing for income) and skills, the Workshop plans to offer a structured diploma-granting track that is also available for auditing. In its first programme period, the Workshop currently offers Writer in Residence Workshops, one off trainings, and community building events and activities. The Workshop looks beyond academe and seeks to empower aspiring writers throughout the country, giving them the tools to creatively express and develop their inner thoughts and experiences.
About Writer in Residence Workshops: A core part of the Palestine Writing Workshop, well-known and distinguished visiting writers facilitate 20-hour genre-based workshops. Students take the workshops over a period that ranges from 1-3 weeks, after which they receive a certificate of completion. These workshops provide students with unique and invaluable trainings with published writers and are instrumental in unleashing creative potential and the development of writing skills.
Course Title: Writing Fiction: Focus on the Writer, Character in Context, and Plot.
Description: This workshop will focus primarily on the discipline of being a writer and the lifestyle and behaviour that enables writing. It will ask participants to examine the complementary aspects of a writer's personality - the creator and the editor, the initiator and the critic. It will develop fluency through in-class writing exercises. The course also looks at how to create fiction characters within a specific and believable context, and will study the bare bones of the 'seven basic plots' which crop up again and again in stories across genres and cultures. This last point should benefit participants in their literature and culture studies as well as in their creative writing. Ultimately the training provides an introduction upon which students can build in other workshops.
About the Instructor: Robin Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, a novel published by Penguin in 2008, and co-editor of www.pulsemedia.org. He has worked as a journalist and an English teacher in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Suadi Arabia and Oman and was a participant in the 2009 Palestine Festival of Literature. Robin’s blog is www.qunfuz.com.
Ideal class size: 8-12 students. Creative writing classes require small classes so that individuals receive feedback on their writing and concepts.
Language: The teaching language will be English, so participants should have advanced English speaking and listening skills. The instructor will ask participants to do some writing in class, but these exercises will be quick responses and do not need to be read out. They’re are not expected to be of literary quality. Therefore it isn’t a problem if a participant does not have great writing skills in English. Lessons learnt/ skills developed in class can be applied to fiction writing in Arabic as much as in English.
Although participants will not be expected to share any writing unless they wish to, they will be expected to discuss their own experience and ideas. The class will be a collaborative effort.
Objectives
To achieve the discipline of daily writing practice. To achieve fluency.
To ‘know yourself’. Thinking about belief and perspective. Thinking about the writer’s relationship with books, voices and rhythms.
To develop the (split) personality of a writer; to understand the different roles of the conscious critic and the unconscious child.
To create characters in their full context – psychological, social, political, historical.
To examine the ‘seven basic plots’.
Pre-course task: First Thing Writing
To set aside 15 to 45 minutes FIRST THING each morning and to write automatically. Write about the first thing that comes into your mind – your dreams, your hopes for the day, a memory, something that’s worrying you, a description of what you see from your bed. Anything. Do this every morning. Do not try to make your writing good. Keep your writing, but do not re-read it.
The following books (among others) will be referred to during the course. It is not necessary to buy or read them:
Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker
The Rabbit novels by John Updike
Life and Fate by Wassily Grossman
The Harafeesh by Naguib Mahfouz
The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim
One copy of each will be present in the class.
Schedule: 20 hours over 10 days
More information here.
