Why take a writing class?

I don't think anyone needs to take a writing class, which is possibly the wrong sort of thing to be saying when one teaches such things. But it's the truth, and honesty is a good policy: it is possible to write, and to write well, without ever having taken a writing class in your life.

So why bother, then? First off is why anyone takes any kind of class - because it's motivation to do the work that you could do on your own, but would tend to put off if you didn't have a class to go to. For the majority of people who want to write, there is always something more immediate, more pressing, than writing. Their full-time job. Their families. Housework. Social life. For the majority of people, especially when starting off and not at the stage of publishers' deadlines, they only have to answer to themselves when it comes to their writing and getting it done.

Having a class helps. It means people work instead of not working. It means there's a structure to it, it means getting to meet other people who are facing the same problems you are - the balance between life and work and writing - and finding ways to deal with them. It means productivity, first and foremost.

That's before the help that constructive criticism, especially from a practicing writer or experienced facilitator, can provide, not to mention comments from your peers. Before getting a kind of structure that might be useful in working on larger projects or in new genres or fields.

But for now I'm curious, and opening this up to whoever might stumble across this - what experiences, good and bad, have you had in writing classes or workshops? If you write but have never taken a class, why not? For both: is there any kind of class you wish was out there, but doesn't seem to be?

(I came across a thing that combines yoga and writing recently, which seems quite cool and would be the sort of thing that would be amazing to run if one were both a writer and yoga teacher. Oh, these multi-talented folk.)

About Claire

'About' pages tend to feel like they should be written in the third person, like mini-biographies inside book covers. I'm curbing the urge.



My writing background:

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and when working on what became my first published book I started thinking about publication. Dear Diary... (Poolbeg Press, 2000) appeared on bookshelves almost two years after I'd started writing it, and several more books with Poolbeg followed: Being Her Sister (2001); Memories (2002); Stereotype (2003); Good Girls Don't (2004); Afterwards (2005); That Girl (2007); Big Picture (2008). The first three were collected in Girls on the Verge: the Claire Hennessy Collection (2005). My ninth book, Every Summer, has just been published (summer 2009). These are books mostly for teenagers and pre-teens (the central characters range between 12 and 18), and I cling to the 'young adult' label where possible. I'm a fan of the first person, the present tense, and multiple viewpoints. All my books come under the heading of 'realistic fiction' and have a contemporary setting, although some day I do want to delve into the more improbable or otherworldly for at least some of my work.

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My teaching background:

I started giving talks and readings and doing school and library visits shortly after the publication of my first book in 2000 (actually, I think the first visit was just before the book was in the shops). I've also spoken at conferences and other events on various issues to do with writing for children and teenagers. These things tend to be once-off events.

In terms of designing and teaching longer courses for adults, I taught the Novel and Novel 2 course at the Irish Writers' Centre (Parnell Sq, Dublin 1) for several terms (2006-8). These were 12-week evening courses, concentrating specifically on novel writing (I also taught an Intermediate Creative Writing course in 2007, where I remembered that things like short stories, poetry and scripts also exist).

I've worked at CTYI (the Irish Centre for Talented Youth) at Dublin City University since June 2005. I worked as a teaching assistant on several courses (Writing For Life, Speculative Fiction Writing, Imaginative Writing) before becoming an instructor. Since 2006, I've taught Script Writing, Writing Stories and Imaginative Writing to 8-13-year-olds, and - since 2007 - Novel Writing to 12-16-year-olds (an intensive three-week summer programme). I also worked as a tutor on the Writing By Mail correspondence course (12-16-year-olds; Transition Year students) and designed the Writing By Mail courses for 8-13-year-olds.

I co-facilitate Song and Writing creative arts workshops (song writing, creative writing, drama, music, performance) for kids and teens. I run these with a good friend of mine, Dara Black, who does magical things with music and with teaching.

I'm one of the founders of the Big Smoke Writing Factory, a space for creative writing workshops, classes and other events in Dublin, run by writers who are also experienced facilitators and bring these twin skills to the classroom. I'm teaching novel writing and young adult fiction in the autumn/winter of 2009.

I've also done some manuscript critiquing, both for pay and on a voluntary basis, and am happy to discuss that with anyone who might be interested.

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What and how I teach:

I believe in tailoring course content to suit a particular group, though obviously depending on age group, time available, and course title, the amount of flexibility varies. A 'general' creative writing course can lead almost anywhere, whereas a course on, say, The Novel, or Young Adult Fiction, or Short Stories, will understandably focus on those things. However, topics might turn up in a different order, or some exercises not used or exchanged for others, in those kind of classes depending on how the course goes. Or to put it another way: there are many routes to whatever the goal of the class is.

I don't use a huge number of examples of 'great works' when I teach, and try to keep the excerpts I do use from relatively recent works (i.e. not Shakespeare, Dickens, or Joyce). I am a believer in thinking about why what you're reading works, but in analysing it from the point-of-view of a writer/reader rather than a literary critic. (So leaving out words of the variety that start with 'post' and end with 'ism' when discussing something, for example.)

The balance between 'writing time', discussion, workshopping (offering up work for constructive criticism) and reading varies from class to class, but (especially in classes for adults) the expectation is that students will work on material outside of class as well, whether it's finishing up or polishing a piece or, say, writing another chapter of their novel.

My main goals when I teach are to get people writing now rather than writing one day, and to help people identify their particular strengths and utilise them in their work. My particular teaching strengths are in a) fiction, particularly novels; b) writing for younger audiences; c) facilitating groups that are working on long-term projects (a novel, a novella, a collection of short stories, etc).

I suspect I'll be revisiting this post every so often. Last updated: 2 September 2009.

Why Writerish.org?

So, the why of writerish.org. It's not my first website, or my me-as-writer website - that lives at clairehennessy.com, and it's not my first blog - I babble on over at livejournal quite a bit. Why on earth, then, do I need another site for? (Quite aside from the joy of having a 'dot org', of course.)

Some of the writerly-tangential things I do tie into my books, and the site and LJ, quite nicely: readings or school visits, where the focus is usually on the specific writer and what they have written and why they've written it and whether or not they've secretly disguised ex-lovers or former friends in the text. That kind of thing. But then there are other things, like creative writing classes or workshops, where what you bring to the table has less to do with your own work so much as what you've learned from it, and what you've learned about "the writing process" (let's keep the quote marks there, shall we?) in the years you've been writing and publishing.

So what I'm trying to do here, I guess, is to have a site I can point people towards to let them know about classes/workshops that I'm doing, or collaborating with, or whatever else seems relevant, without having to subject them to days and days wading through various versions of 'Dear livejournal, today I drank lots of tea and pondered the meaning of life.' We'll see how it goes.