Wordpath
Scotland is home to some of the world’s most exciting fiction. It is also home to WordPath Scotland’s innovative, dynamic and successful online creative writing programme.
Delivering a highly creative, inspirational and intensely practical course of workshops, one-on-one and roundtable discussions designed and taught by a small and friendly team of internationally published award-winning writers.
Have you thought about writing?
3 writing exercises to get you started
Come into the present moment.
Step away from the computer. Take a paper and pen. Close your eyes, take three deep breaths. Open your eyes and look out the window. What’s do you see? Just observe. Then, ask yourself: What’s my internal weather today? Write for three minutes. Keep the pen moving across the page, don’t cross out or censor yourself.
Separate the Creator from the Editor
Allow yourself to follow random ideas, trains of thought without editing yourself or expecting perfection first time. Writing is a practice. Write for 5 minutes on what you saw/tasted/heard/touched/smelled between waking up and coming to the page. Again – keep the pen moving, don’t edit yourself. The critical, editorial voice should be left at the door in the early stages of writing. Which leads us to:
Finish Something!
Then start with the line: ‘The first time I left…( home, school, a job, a place, a relationship…)
Include all of the elements you’ve listed above. Go for ten minutes, allow the pen to keep moving over the page, don’t cross out or worry about spelling or grammar. Allow yourself to finish a rough draft of a story. Let it cool for three days. Then go back to it. The most important thing is to finish a piece of work – after that, you can go back and re-draft, as many times as you like. It is not supposed to be perfect first time. Writing is not like that. Allow yourself to play and explore…
About Wordpath
Meaghan Delahunt and Kirsty Gunn bring with them over 20 years of writing and teaching experience at universities in Scotland, the UK, and at a range of institutions and community groups world-wide. As writers and teachers, they’ve created a distinctive suite of writing courses, all aimed to make the most of your creativity and designed to get you writing straight away - generating new projects as well as refreshing and re-energising your current writing practice.
Together, Meaghan and Kirsty can help you bring your short stories, non-fiction and novels along an exciting path that takes you from first draft to final manuscript, from imagined idea to a finished reality.
There are three courses to choose from:
An exciting, intensive five day course which will light up a fresh approach to writing short stories or novels - whether you have started on these or are at the early stages of thinking about what you want to write.
A six week, two hour evening course of reading and writing – putting women centre stage as both important subjects and innovative authors of the short story form.
A long weekend course– from Friday morning to Sunday evening – designed to kick-start your creativity and start you on your “wordpath” to completing a novel.