Jem Poster and Sarah Burton

A work of fiction will usually draw to some extent – sometimes to a significant extent – on the writer’s personal experience, but it doesn’t simply replicate that experience. How might we use our own experience as the basis or starting point for the writing of a novel or short story? And to what extent might we need to distance ourselves from the facts of our lives in the interests of our fictions? This one-day course will address these and related questions, guiding you towards ways of writing that are at once grounded in experience and imaginatively adventurous.

This course can be taken alone or in conjunction with the previous day’s Rediscovered Selves: Writing Memoir and Autobiography.

Designed by two professional writers with long experience of teaching creative writing at university level, the course will address the writer’s art and craft in ways both practical and thought-provoking, involving both writing and the discussion of writing. The focus will be primarily on fiction, but writers of poetry and creative non-fiction are likely to gain useful insights from the event.

The course has been devised with a group of 30 in mind. However, the presence of two tutors means that, apart from a short period at the beginning of the course and another at the end, the teaching will take place in groups of 15. Each group will have two sessions with each tutor.

The sessions
9.30-11.00: Session 1: Introduction/Drawn from life
11.00-11.30: Coffee
11.30-1.00: Session 2: Rewriting history
1.00-2.00: Lunch
2.00-3.30: Session 3: Other worlds, other selves
3.30 - 4.00: Tea
4.00 - 5.30: Session 4: Drawing it all together

Session 1: Introduction/Drawn from life
The difference between life-writing and fiction – yet our own lives inform our fictions. The value of ‘writing what you know’ and the liberation of writing what you don’t know – the uses of imagination. Preliminary discussion of our need, as fiction-writers, to distance ourselves from our own experience.

Session 2: Rewriting history
Practical work followed by discussion. How might we reconfigure the real events of our lives in the interests of creating a more satisfying story?

Session 3: Other worlds, other selves
Can we imagine a more radical revisioning? – experiences we’ve never had, undergone by characters quite different from ourselves.

Session 4: Drawing it all together
Practical work followed by discussion. General overview of ways of incorporating in our writing the insights we’ve gained during the course.

The tutors
Jem Poster is emeritus professor of creative writing, Aberystwyth University. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Brought to Light, and two novels, Courting Shadows and Rifling Paradise. Sarah Burton, founder and former director of Cambridge University’s MSt in creative writing, is the author of non-fiction works, Impostors and A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, and a novel, The Strange Adventures of H. Together, they are co-authors of a handbook for fiction writers, The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write and a recently published companion book of writing exercises, The Prompts You Need to Help You Write the Book You Want to Write. Their co-written historical crime novel, Eliza Mace, was published in 2024.