WELCOME

1. WELCOME UAL level 3 Extended Diploma: Journalism and Creative Writing

2. Learning objectives: • To develop an early understanding of the course and its requirements. • Discuss and examine the main ingredients/reasons of why someone writes. • Research techniques: open questions – effective questions • To begin thinking about the essential parts of a story and in particular character. • Why we write

3. Class Rules and Blogging • GROUP RULES: What we all expect from each other AS WRITERS and what we need from each other as writers? • BLOGGING AND BLOGS/WORDPRESS – WEEKLY RECORD OF THE WORK: • How to use your journal/blog: WHAT WE DID, HOW WE DID IT AND WHY WE DID IT? BE CREATIVE!!!! AD MULTI-MEDIA EXAMPLES ETC • PLUS ANALYSIS OF INDUSTRY/PUBLISHED EXAMPLES THAT IMPACT ON YOUR WORK.

4. DISCUSSIONS • DISCUSSION 1 • Careers for writers – as a way of introducing the course and what we will cover: DISCUSS EMPLOYABILITY/LIFE SKILLS, TRANSFERABLE SKILLS, HOW TO SELL/MARKET YOURSELF ETC. • DISCUSSION 2: USEFUL RESOURCES FOR THE COURSE • NEW WRITING SOUTH & BBC WRITERS ROOM • WRITERS MAGAZINES on line competitions and submissions. • Online blogs and writer’s tips ON ALL ASPECTS OF CRAFTING. • LRC: We have a section for creative writing and journalism .

5. What is writing? • HOW DO WE WRITE: • What are the most important components and how does this help affect the reader? • This should be an on-going aspect of your crafting.

6. What is writing? • Words: word choice. • Sentences: the right words in the right order with the right punctuation. • But what kind of words and what kind of sentences? • What is crafting and how important is this to the writers process? • DISCUSS!

7. What’s in a face? • Look at faces: what stories do they tell? • Match the questions to the faces. • EXERCISE: Write a short piece based on the face and the question YOU CHOSE.

8. Life writing orPENNED PORTRAITS – getting to know me and you • Getting to know each other. Treat the session like a life drawing session, but instead of drawing me you will write about me and then about one other student. • Introduction to me • Before I tell the students about me • Life drawing exercise: Write about me. • Feedback & The truth • Try this with other people in the class: BE NICE! • Feedback – follow same process. • Write down what others might and have said about you: agree and or disagree • TRY WRITING A SHORT FICTIONAL OR JOURNAILSTIC PIECE USING THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE NOTED DOWN.

9. why writers write? • Question and answer session: Share opinions and feelings • Why do you write and why do you think other writers write? What do they hope to achieve with their writing? • E. B. White said, “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” What do you hope to say through your writing?

10. Why I write • http://goinswriter.com/why-i-write/

11. Anais Nin Why I Write • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-dRf7Zxf8Q

12. Why I Write- Cecilia Knapp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ63Vv6eOew

13. The Nature of the Fun: David Foster Wallace on Why Writers Write • http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/06/the-nature-of-fun-david-foster-wallace/

14. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • To End LonelinessWhy do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.'(Jonathan Safran Foer, quoted by Deborah Solomon in "The Rescue Artist." The New York Times, February 27, 2005) • To Have FunI write basically because it's so much fun--even though I can't see. When I'm not writing, as my wife knows, I'm miserable.(James Thurber, interviewed by George Plimpton and Max Steele, 1955. The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II, ed. by Philip Gourevitch. Picador, 2007)

15. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • To Keep a Hold on LifeWe do not write because we must; we always have choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life.(bell hooks [Gloria Watkins], Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. Henry Holt and Co., 1999) • To Unload[Y]ou get a great deal off your chest--emotions, impressions, opinions. Curiosity urges you on--the driving force. What is collected must be got rid of.(John Dos Passos. The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV, ed. by George Plimpton. Viking, 1976) • To Leave a LegacyIt is the deepest desire of every writer, the one we never admit or even dare to speak of: to write a book we can leave as a legacy. . . . If you do it right, and if they publish it, you may actually leave something behind that can last forever.(Alice Hoffman, "The Book That Wouldn't Die: A Writer's Last and Longest Voyage." The New York Times, July 22, 1990

16. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • To Evoke the Past and the PresentNothing ever seems to me quite real at the moment it happens. It's part of the reason for writing, since the experience never seems quite real until I evoke it again. That's all one tries to do in writing, really, to hold something--the past, the present.(Gore Vidal, interviewed by Bob Stanton in Views from a Window: Conversations With Gore Vidal. Lyle Stuart, 1980)

17. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can't do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. . . .(OrhanPamuk, "My Father's Suitcase" [Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 2006]. Other Colors: Essays and a Story, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Vintage Canada, 2008) • To Learn SomethingI write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I didn't know before I wrote it.(Laurel Richardson, Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. Rutgers University Press, 1997) • To Think More CoherentlyI write because I enjoy expressing myself, and writing forces me to think more coherently than I do when just shooting off my mouth.(William Safire, William Safire On Language. Times Books, 1980)

18. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • To Keep From Going CrazyI write because it's the only thing I'm really very good at in the whole world. And I've got to stay busy to stay out of trouble, to keep from going crazy, dying of depression. So I continue to do the one thing in the world that I feel very very good at. I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of it.(Reynolds Price, quoted by S.D. Williams in "Reynolds Price on the South, Literature, and Himself." Conversations With Reynolds Price, ed. by Jefferson Humphries. University Press of Mississippi, 1991) • To Make a HomeOne writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time, in others' minds.(Alfred Kazin, "The Self As History." Telling Lives, ed. by Marc Pachter. New Republic Books, 1979)

19. WHY DO WRITERS WRITE? • To Discover, to Uncover . . . I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. . . .(Terry Tempest Williams, "A Letter to Deb Clow." Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. Pantheon Books, 2001)

20. Why I Write By Joan Didion http://englishis4everyone.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/joan-didions-why-i-write.html

21. Exercise • Read Joan Didion's essay "Why I Write", in your own words, I would like you to state as succinctly as possible...why does she write? What does writing do for her as a person? What effect does mentioning her "not being a thinker" in college, have on the overall essay? And, what is the overall purpose of Didion's essay? USE THIS TO AID YOUR REFLECTIONS ON THE BLOG AND YOUR OWN WHY I WRITE.

22. Why You Write? • Now it's your turn. Regardless of what you write--fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, letters or journal entries--see if you can explain why you write.

23. Crafting! • Find a favourite writer and analyse the style of writing: how they achieve the effect they are looking for, word choice, literary devices such as metaphor, the impact the opening has to the story, the structure of sentences and the overall piece of writing, character/human interest descriptions, POV and tense etc.