Short Story online

                                                 Delivered live via Zoom

This four-week course (eight hours) is designed to facilitate you in writing and editing a short story. 

Course outline:

· Description is all about the images you put in the reader’s head to allow them to fully experience your story. How you describe the events, characters and places is how the reader will perceive your story, which should be the perceptions you want them to have. Good description is the essence of your story, using the five senses, it brings your story to life. Like many other aspects of story, it is a balancing act between what is enough and what is too much.

· Voice and Point of View: Maeve Binchy said that ‘voice’ was finding a way to write that is natural to you, a way that is unaffected, a way that will not have you getting caught out because you are writing with a style you thought was appropriate. She suggested that you would only find that voice by telling your story your way. Point of view is about who tells the story: Is it a narrator or a character in the story? Whose eyes are seeing the events of the story as they unfold. Whose thoughts has the reader access to. From what distance (time and place) are the events being viewed?

· Theme and Plot are not the same, although they are often confused, which is what we will be exploring. Plot is what happens in the story, Theme is what the story is about, an idea which is at the centre of your story.

· Editing and common errors: Drawing on the work of Noah Lukeman and John Gardner, in the final week, we will look at ways of polishing up our stories before sending them out into the world.

My goal for you would be that over the 4 weeks you would write a short story, work on it each week, then spend some time at the end of the course on the edit and the rewrite before making a final submission for assessment approximately two weeks after the completion of the course. I would ask that your story be a minimum of 2000 words and a maximum of 4000, as this is the most conventional range for submissions to magazines, journals, and competitions.

While your manuscripts will not be workshopped during the classes, I will suggest that you share your work in progress with the group so that any references you make to your text during our discussions will be familiar and thus enable the sharing of ideas.

There will be a reading assignment each week and writers of the short form you can expect to encounter include William Trevor, Eílís Ní Dhuibhne, Claire Keegan, Danielle McLaughlin, Flannery O’ Connor, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Carys Davies, and Kevin Barry.

Completion of the 1st short story online course is not required to register for this course.

Course cost €120

Class numbers will not exceed ten.