Join us at Words Away for a masterclass led by the award-winning writer and teacher Alice Jolly. We’ll spend the day learning new skills and sampling different approaches to creating a dynamic scene. Discover how to give your scene purpose and structure through character and dialogue. Come along ready to experiment - the scene is the basic building block for so many projects and this practical masterclass should appeal to fiction writers as well as those writing for theatre and film. For experienced writers as well as beginners. We’ll end the day with a Q&A with Amy Winchester, Head of Publicity at Unbound.
Program for the day:
10.00–10.45: Two key skills: When to show and when to tell, the importance of choosing the right details.
10.45-11.30: Creating character: Finding the emotional journeys, identifying the turn.
11.30–11.45: Break (tea, coffee and cake provided)
11.45–12.45: Writing the dialogue: Creating the context. The role of place and action. What is one character doing to the other character?
12.45–14:00: Lunch (we can offer recommendations for places to find lunch nearby at London Bridge and Borough Market)
14.00–14.30: Text and sub text: cutting down the dialogue, making the reader do the work for you.
14.30–15.00: Putting it into practice: trying out your skills by writing a scene.
15.00–15.30: Workshopping: investigate the scene you have written with other members of the group.
15.30–15.45: Break (tea, coffee and cake provided)
15.45–17.00: Q&A with an Industry Speaker: Amy Winchester, Head of Publicity at Unbound.
Workshop Leader
Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. She has won the Pen Ackerley Prize for memoir and also the V.S.Pritchett Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature. She teaches creative writing on the Masters Degree at Oxford University. Her fourth novel ‘Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile’ was a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel for 2109, was on the longlist for the Ondaatje Prize 2019 and was runner up for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019.
Industry Guest
Amy Winchester is the Head of Publicity at Unbound, where her publicity campaign for 2016's breakout hit The Good Immigrant was shortlisted for a PPC Award. The most data-driven publisher on earth, and the first ever to use crowdfunding, Unbound’s mission is to disrupt the industry by bringing authors into direct communication with readers and delivering books that don’t fit the mould.