This Friday, 15 August, I’ll be hosting a creative writing workshop on Zoom. The workshop takes place between 9 and 1pm, SAST. The focus of this month’s workshop is place.
Where our stories take place matters, for the reader who seeks novelty or familiarity, and for the characters themselves. In this workshop we’ll play with:
You’ll leave with some writing that creates vivid, meaningful settings for your story, and may even spark some new plots or characters for you.
- Micro and macro worldbuilding — great for those of you who are writing fantasy, speculative fiction, magical realism, or anything slightly different from the world as you know it. These exercises are useful too for anyone writing more realist fiction because they make you consider your assumptions about setting and place, and what it means for your story and characters.
- Using your senses to make your story setting come alive — great for you if you’re writing scenes that are unfamiliar to your protagonists, or if you’re hoping to make your writing a bit richer. Also great if you’re writing non-fiction, and want to convey to the reader how it feels to inhabit a particular place.
- Rubbing up against your characters with setting and to see how it affects their actions — great if you’re feeling stuck with a character, or your character is feeling stuck. For those of you who have attended in July, you can work on characters you’ve already built, or on creating some new ones.
- Exploring how setting and place can create an atmosphere and mood for your story — sometimes our setting can become a character in itself, and it can help to create dramatic tension.
- How setting can be the backbone of a story, setting you up with a plot.
- Devices to create a realistic setting, and some cliches to avoid.
On the fence? Here are some lovely comments from past workshop attendees.
Every workshop booked and paid for in August 2025 gets a free copy of one of my books – either The Peculiars, The Fall, or Living While Feminist.
To sign up, email me: jenthorpewrites@gmail.com
See you in a workshop soon!
Jen Thorpe 