Class Details
Writing the Real Course
Course summary
This writing course offers you a rich immersion in creative nonfiction, practical tuition and instruction in composition and style, along with plenty of opportunities to write and be inspired. You’ll learn how to approach nonfiction with imagination, discipline and lyricism. The course explores the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction and the meanings of real and truthful. It encourages writers to understand nonfiction as literature and shows them how to employ imagination, discipline, creativity and lyricism in its composition, just as one would in fiction. Although a work of nonfiction can be every bit as literary in its distinction and design as a novel, nonfiction cleaves to the actual – something that places a heavy burden of truth-telling upon the writer and reorients imagination from invention to witness.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- discover the material in your life and world that calls you to write about it
- practise writing non-fiction prose in different genres – essay, memoir, feature journalism, blog, history, travel
- make of the life you lead, the thoughts you think, the places and things you know, works told as freshly and vividly as the best fiction
- grow good ideas and arrange life experiences into finished works of literary art
- apply time-honoured techniques and insights to take you writing from good to great and make it into a work that may touch and change others’ lives.
Content
- Foundations
- Approach
- Writing practice
- The literature of witness and attention
- The language of solid ground
- Nonfiction as literature
- Essays
- Principles of writing well
- The elements of style
- Words and music
- The importance of place
- Form and structure
- Planning
- Coherence
- Writing with your reader in mind
- Getting started
- Carrying on
- The ethics of nonfiction
- Editing and finishing
- Fourteen troublesome words and phrases
Who this course is for
Suitable for anyone wanting to write well about the world we inhabit, the things we know - from family history to politics, from sport to philosophy, from self-help to biography and travel.
Deliver modes
- Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
- Online workshop via the platform Zoom
Delivery style
This workshop marries informally delivered pedagogy with inspirational ideas and practical tips from an experienced professional writer. It models great writing through a selection of fine readings across all genres; and it invites participants to write each week and receive tutelage and feedback from the facilitator and fellow participants.
Materials
Course notes are distributed electronically using Dropbox.
Sessions
Location
Face-to-face (CCE Building, Sydney)
Public transport
As bus and train timetables regularly change, we suggest you visit the Transport for NSW trip planner before you set out.
The nearest train stations are Newtown Station and Macdonaldtown Station. Macdonaldtown Station is closer by distance than Newtown Station, however trains do not stop as frequently as at Newtown Station.
Other information
Parking
Nearby parking is available at Wilson Parking - RPA Medical Centre Car Park (entry via Elizabeth Street off Carillon Avenue).
A Flexi Saver Rate is available but must be booked in advance online and includes the booking fee. Bookings can be made via the Wilson website or by downloading the Wilson Parking App. Otherwise, hourly parking rates will apply, as advertised on the Wilson Parking website.
Meet the facilitators
Mark Tredinnick
Mark Tredinnick, winner of the Montreal Poetry Prize (2011) and the Cardiff Poetry Prize (2012), is the author of The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary, and nine other acclaimed works of poetry and prose.
His work is widely published in Australian and overseas newspapers and journals, including Australian Poetry, Blue Dog, Five Bells, Indigo, Island, Isotope, Kunapipi, Manoa, Mascara, Meanjin, Orion, PAN, Southerly, Snorkel, The Grove, The Sun-Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, Wet Ink, World Literature Today. He writes regularly for newspapers including The Australian, The Sun-Herald, and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Mark talks and teaches widely on writing, landscape, justice and ecology. For over a decade he has run writing programs at the University of Sydney and at writers' centres in Australia and the United States. He runs them these days, too, in his cowshed in Burradoo. He mentors aspiring writers, and now and then he edits a manuscript in need of help. He teaches grammar and composition, and he consults, on writing matters, with clients in business and government. For ten years, before all that, Mark was a book editor and publisher. Once upon a time he was a lawyer.
