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Why Your Writing Is Broken and How to Fix It with Jan Carson - Workshop

Where: Dingle Lit Festival

Cost -€50

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An interactive and informative workshop focusing in on the mistakes almost every writer makes and how to avoid making them in your own writing. There’ll be space to look at how you approach the act of writing and identify areas where you could significantly improve upon your creative process, as well as time set aside to explore where your writing’s going wrong on a sentence by sentence basis. This workshop will be incredibly practical, easy to understand and full of hard-learnt advice.  

The workshop is particularly aimed at novelists and short story writers though it will contain useful advice for everyone.  

What the workshop covers

The workshop will fall into three separate sections. We’ll look at how to fix mistakes in creative practice – how we go about the act of writing. We’ll focus in on common writing mistakes which occur on a sentence-by-sentence level, learning how to craft sentences in a more accurate and innovative way. We’ll also look at issues surrounding the editorial process and how to correct larger structural issues in a piece of prose fiction. All participants should come with a working draft of a piece of writing they’re keen to edit. 

Workshop leader 

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, followed by a short-story collection, Children’s Children (2016), and two flash fiction anthologies, Postcard Stories (2017) and Postcard Stories 2 (2020). Her second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award. Her third novel, The Raptures (2022) was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses is forthcoming from Doubleday in Spring 2024.