Quebec Writers' Federation Workshops

Spring Session 2010

Develop your writing with the mentorship of an acclaimed professional writer and feedback from your peers.

Workshops take place at the QWF office, Suite 3, Atwater Library unless otherwise indicated.

FICTION FROM START TO FINISH

Eight Mondays, 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. (March 1–April 19, 2010)

1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 3
Workshop leader: Saleema Nawaz

This eight-week workshop will be focused on fiction essentials: examining the mechanics of literature, practicing and improving our writing skills, honing our abilities as careful readers, and developing essential habits to make us into better and more productive writers.

In each class, we will look at and experiment with different aspects of writing craft (voice, diction, conflict, point of view, dialogue, characterization, plot), and we will spend time workshopping writing submitted by the participants. There will be a technical aspect to the workshop as we look at the nuts and bolts of literary writing. The emphasis will be on learning how to make our fiction stronger — word by word, sentence by sentence.

At the same time, we will examine our writing goals and intentions. What are the stories we are passionate about telling? What are our obsessions? We may look at selections of relevant texts for inspiration and instruction. It will be valuable for us as writers to continue to deepen our understanding of why we like what we like and why it works.

We are also going to try and tackle one of the most critical problems faced by aspiring writers: not writing. Many of us have notebooks or hard drives full of half-finished stories, or dozens of intricately plotted ideas we haven’t yet managed to get down on paper. Maybe we have only five separate, perfect sentences, or a set of characters with no story. Or maybe we just have nice pens and nothing else! No matter what stage we are at with our projects, it will be fruitful to focus on how to get inspired and stay motivated. We will take a start-to-finish approach to fiction by examining concrete ways to trigger ideas, generate pages, and edit existing drafts.

Part of each class will be spent on writing exercises and discussion. The rest of each class will be spent on workshopping. When you have material to share (it could be a complete story or chapter or a selection from a work-in-progress), you will be responsible for bringing enough copies for the rest of the group. You will also be responsible for reading other participants’ work over the course of the week and offering thoughtful criticism at the next class. If you like, bring along a description of your current projects (if any) to our first meeting, so that we can start getting a sense of what everyone is working towards.

If you have pages ready to share, please bring 12 copies to the first meeting so that we have something to look at in the second class.

Saleema Nawaz's fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Grain, and The New Quarterly. Her first collection, Mother Superior, was published by Freehand Books in Fall 2008 and was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2008 McAuslan First Book Prize. Her short story “My Three Girls,” was the winner of the 2008 Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.

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