Sunday 5 October 2008

Warwick Words...

Over the last few days, the Warwick Festival of Literature and Spoken Word has been running. This has been a fantastic event, with some wonderful writers and speakers giving their time. I have attended three writing workshops over the week, all of which have been fantastic. I have met some great writers and hopefully made some new friends. But I just wanted to talk about today's workshop in a little more detail, as this blog comes into it!

The workshop was called Writing For Children & Teenagers and was presented by the children's writer Celia Rees. (http://www.celiarees.com/) It was a great workshop, full of talk and practical advice about writing in general, writing for children specifically and how to get published. We also did some workshop exercises, writing in the first and third person, which were insightful. Celia was encouraging and very generous, and I think everyone who attended enjoyed the session. ('Hello!' to anyone reading this who was there this morning! )I thought it was a very diverse and interesting group of people, all at different stages in their writing.

We talked about a few resources. I mentioned the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) and also the OU coursebook which is entitled,
Creative Writing, A Workbook with Readings, by Linda Anderson (ed), published by Routledge (2005)

Also I mentioned blogs which are of interest to writers. There really are loads, and I'm only just getting to grips with all this myself. There are some blogs listed on my page, and the other one I mentioned was Nathan Bransford's blog. He's the American literary agent. That's at www.nathanbransford.blogspot.com.
There are so many others, so if you find anything interesting about writing let me know!

3 comments:

Celia Rees said...

Hi Claire,

Glad you enjoyed the workshop and that you thought it was useful. Great group, weren't they? I just wished that we'd had more time - everyone was so enthusiastic and there was tons more we could have done. It was a good way for writers to meet each other, too. Writing can be a lonely business.

Celia

belle said...

Wow, what a fantastic event! Must try and make it next year, remind me when it's on!! And a comment from Celia too - fantstic :)

claires inner world said...

Hi Celia,
Thanks for leaving your comment - I wish we'd had a whole day - half for talking, half for writing; that would have been great...

Hello lovely Belle,
I would have let you know if I'd known you'd want to come. Will remind you next year. (Oh yes, check me out; with 'proper' writers leaving comments on my blog...!! ;-)) x x