Faber Writing Course – a 1/3 of the way through

I can’t believe we are half way through February already; this year is going SO fast! Sorry for the delay writing a blog post about the Faber Academy course I am doing, it’s been pretty hectic the last couple of weeks. We are now four sessions into the course and I wanted to have something interesting to say about it…that’s not to say I haven’t been having an interesting time so far. You know how it is with courses though – the first session is all introduction stuff, for the second session the person leading it was away doing book signings and radio interviews, so it is really only the third session and last week’s fourth time in class that we really got our teeth into something. Last week and week five have an extra hour tagged on to catch up for missing week 2.

We are a diverse group of writers from all backgrounds, most of us are 40 plus and looking to get something in print. Some people want to concentrate on short stories/novellas and others, like yours truly, want to play in the big game with the full works 80,000+ word novels. In the intro session we all submitted our WIP ideas and got feedback on them. I was impressed with some of the things people are working on and there are definitely several I’ll happily read if/when brought to fruition. My own feedback was that the Basil WIP is very viable – it’s apparently topical for the young adult market and could be a very viable proposition – here’s hoping anyway!

Week three saw us all exploring the ‘writer’s voice’- our own and those of famous writers like Austen, Hemingway and Stephen King. We had to dig deep into ourselves to find our motivations, experiences and traits that might influence our own writer’s voice.

Last Thursday was particularly good – all about plots…plot ideas, plot structures, plot pacing, the rise and fall of plot development through a novel, three act plotting and so on. I really enjoyed it and there were some good writing exercises to focus us. I love the writing off the cuff exercises where you are given something – an object, a character, a scenario and you start to plot around it. In fact I have a detailed plot and character set for a dark psychological thriller that was born out of just an exercise a year ago, more of that another time though.

Homework this week is writing a 1500 word synopsis of our work in progress which is to be written playing to all the rules set by agents and publishing houses. It seems most authors hate writing a synopsis of their book, but I am loving it…hope I’m doing it right! I started with detailed bullet points of all the main points and actions during the novel, now I need to flesh around them according to the ‘rules’ of synopsis writing – correct person narrative, tenses etc.

I also got feedback on my first 2000 words of Basil’s story that had been handed in for assessment. It was with a little trepidation that I sat there seeing my peers receive feedback and waiting for my name to be called. It was also with a huge relief that I was told apart from a couple of cock ups with tenses in the first paragraph it was “…excellent. I really enjoyed reading it and look forward to more.’…I couldn’t have been happier, great encouragement to keep going…just as well since I’m over 25,000 words into Basil so far!

Next week I need to submit my own offering for peer review the following week. The rest of the class will be getting Basil’s story part way through so I think I will include a very short resume of what has gone before. I hope they like it. I think this coming Thursday is sub plotting and character development.

That’s all for now. I’ll give you another update after a couple more lessons and let you know how Basil’s shaping up.