Creative Writing 101
Our experiences (and our memory of them) give us our identity and are the great reward from a life lived.
Writing can take many forms but it's always about transforming experience, reflection and insight into treasure forever. In a fast-changing world, writing your life-review, memoir, family-history, becoming a diarist or blogger for the first time in your life... can be an important gift to yourself as well as a priceless inheritance for family and friends. Or perhaps you know you have a novel in you, or want to gather and shape your collection of short stories or personal essays, or have delayed until now that non-fiction treatise or meditation in your area of expertise or passion.
Unlike ballet, writing is an ambition and art that favours age, and many successful authors (eg. America's Harriet Doerr) don't turn to the page until 70 and beyond, and yet they still get their body-of-work out there.
In this 1 hour and 1 minute (1:01) introduction to writing well, learn a couple of key guiding principles and try out a couple of exercises and discover how being part of a writing group is friendly and fun. AND IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU LEARN, and like what you write— why not keep going and enrol for the two session workshop 'TALE WELL TOLD ' that begins the very next day (Sat 15th & 22nd March.)
This class is part of the NSW Seniors Festival. It's Time to Shine: Embrace Your Creativity, Health, and Knowledge!
Bookings essential
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About the tutor
Janet Fennell
Janet is published as a short-story writer (general fiction, SF&F, 'romance'), novelist, reviewer, essayist and poet and ran her first creative writing course for the NSCC in 1998. After the sudden and early death of her husband, the eerily prescient nature of her first novel Only Myself (about a young widow) caused her to destroy work and she stepped away from all creative writing for some 15 years. But she continued to coach others to words and, eventually, her teaching persuaded her back to the page so that now she feels more dedicated than ever to the regenerative power of creative endeavour, and to completing her writing projects, and to helping others find their voice and reach their writing goals. She is currently at work on a novel and a 'memoir-meditation-manual' on writing and life.
Janet studied English (BA), Librarianship (DipLib) and Writing (MA) at university, as well as performance writing at AFTRS & NIDA, and spent many years working in librarianship and corporate communications prior to and alongside her creative work. In 2023 she spent six weeks as Writer-in-Residence as St Mark's College in Adelaide (a residential university college) and most recently (Mar-May '24) she undertook residencies in Italy and France and was a participant at the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano.
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