Over the past few weeks I've been doing a ghost story writing workshop with Adam Z Robinson. I wanted to just write a little bit about it because I've thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to any writer.
I actually went to 6th form college with Adam and one of my best friends is a friend of his, and we're friends on Facebook, which is where I saw the link for this workshop. It was a six week course, with a live workshop on Facebook every Monday evening, and it was around £35. I thought that was excellent value so signed up. Each week we had recommended reading and some 'homework' to do. Then in the workshops we had exercises to do, prompts to follow, and had the opportunity to share our work too. Adam was live on Facebook and the attendees could comment alongside.
The reading list was so good, I am still only about halfway through it and have plans to read lots more. I don't often read ghost stories, but after reading Good Girls Die First I really wanted to try my hand at writing some. I usually write contemporary, realistic fiction with no hint of the supernatural, but I wanted to stretch myself and this seemed ideal.
Our course ended on the 26th of October and then, for Halloween, Adam was doing a horror writing workshop on the 31st, so I signed up for that too. That was £6 so really good value. It was for 2.5 hours and in that time I wrote over 1700 words, which was great! I really enjoyed myself.
I liked a lot of the exercises throughout the course and wrote some interesting little bits through them. I also liked the theory about what is scary, and why it's scary, and how to achieve that in writing. I learnt a lot and would definitely do another of Adam's courses in the future.
I'm actually about to embark on Nanowrimo, where you write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November, which is 1667 words a day, but I won't be incorporating ghosts... Maybe next year! I love my realistic YA too much!
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