Five-Day Course of Exploration & Creativity
Through a combination of morning masterclasses, optional one-on-one mentoring sessions, and late afternoon workshops (to be taken with a glass of wine), Frances will help you find your voice (your speaking voice is not the same as your writing voice), uncover your plot structure (Comedy? Tragedy? Quest?) locate your major turning points, and dig deep into the memories that count. You will learn not only how to turn your first thoughts into a polished manuscript, but how to edit, approach an agent, or produce your work privately.
Frances Wilson’s courses are never, however, just about putting pen to paper and then hopefully finding a publisher. They are about the process of building a book, because writing about a life requires character analysis, unlocking the imagination, and finding the right size and shape for the tale you want to tell. Past participants have arrived believing that they are memoirists, only to discover they have a novel inside them. Others, who think they are beginning a biography, leave having embarked on a book-length poem. Many of Frances’s pupils go on to form their own writing groups, and return to her classes in order to share their evolving work.
Our time in Bruton will be spent talking, sharing ideas, planning the project that lies ahead and, most importantly, re-learning how to read. Good writers are strong readers: only by appreciating the techniques of the best writing can your own work take shape. We will therefore explore the roller-coaster history of biography and autobiography in all its genres, looking closely at masterpieces of Romanticism and Modernism such as ‘The Prelude’, Wordsworth’s poem on the growth of his own mind, ‘Flush’, Virginia Woolf’s life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, and the slippery nature of autofiction, exemplified by Karl Ove Knausgård in his six-volume masterpiece of self-exploration, ‘My Struggle’. As preparation for the course, you will be asked to look at Robert Lowell’s controversial poem ‘The Dolphin’, in which he incorporated private letters from his estranged wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (‘art just isn’t worth that much’, a shocked Elizabeth Bishop told him), Annie Ernaux’s collage of collective memory, ‘The Years’, and Craig Brown’s innovative approach to royal biography, ‘A Voyage Round the Queen’.
