Writing Your Truth
We’re pleased to offer a summer masterclass with award-winning and Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures shortlisted novelist, Jessica Andrews. This two-week, intensive workshop will walk students through how to write from lived experience, and how to turn their lives and memories into stories.
About the course
Course Fee
:
Course Dates
Sunday, May 5th, 2024
Sunday, May 12th, 2024
All sessions will take place via Zoom at 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time and run for two hours until 18:00 GMT. Please note this is 17:00–19:00 BST
Course Length
2 weeks - May 5th and May 12th, 2024
Weekly Study
Two Hours
Testimonial
Course summary
In this two-week masterclass, students will examine the relationship between memory and truth through an exploration of fiction, autofiction and memoir. There will be discussion of a range of contemporary writers who blur the lines between these genres and consider which form best fits the story we want to tell. The group will examine the craft and ethics of writing from memory and lived experience. We will interrogate what it means to use the parameters of your own life to interrogate a particular question or to illuminate a truth that feels close to you.
Hear from Jessica Andrews:
We’re going to consider what it means to write from lived experience. We’ll look at the often slippery boundaries between autofiction, fiction and memoir. We’ll consider the role of emotional truth in our writing, and help you find the form that best fits the story you want to tell.
When it comes to writing from lived experience, one of the most difficult obstacles can be worrying that your story is uninteresting or unworthy of literature. As an experiment, write a detailed account of a mundane task, such as: washing the dishes, sitting on the bus, or completing a task at work that you particularly dislike. How can you make this experience feel alive to your readers? Focus on sounds, tastes, physical sensations, and small, specific details that make this experience unique to you. Is there anything you can describe in an unexpected or unfamiliar way?
Hopefully, this should teach you that any experience is deserving of literature, if we develop the skills with which to tell it.
How you will learn
Our team of editors, novelists and scriptwriters will provide a helping hand – making you a more confident writer.
Thanks to our status as a platform for discovering the best literary talent – having helped kick-start the careers of several literary writers to acclaim, such as Nikesh Shukla, Naomi Alderman, Peng Shepherd, Clare Wigfall, Stuart Evers, Inua Ellams and others on the Man Booker Prize longlists – we have far-reaching external networks that create opportunities for your work to get in front of editors, agents and publishers. You will learn through:
- Generating and pitching ideas
- Submissions best practices and feedback
- Live readings & performances
- Writing and sharing your work online
- Specialist workshops
- Live salons
The Tutor
Jessica Andrews
Jessica writes fiction. Her debut novel, Saltwater was published by Sceptre in 2019 and won the Portico Prize in 2020. It explores mother-daughter relationships and shifting class identity in relation to place and the body. Her second novel, Milk Teeth interrogates wanting, denial, food and shame and will be published in July 2022. She writes for the Guardian, the Independent, BBC Radio 4, Stylist and ELLE magazine, among others. She was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Futures in 2022 and nominated for the ELLE list in 2020. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University.