Conflict & Tension with Leon Craig

Do you have a first draft but can’t make it come alive on the page? Struggling to hear your characters’ voices? Just love the drama? In this one-day workshop on tension and conflict in fiction, we will look at how disagreement and uncertainty drive narrative, with reference to a wide range of effective examples from published works of fiction. Participants will gain new models for representing differences on the page and an understanding of how these can be deployed to enhance characterisation and pacing.

Email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!

We might try to avoid or reduce discord in our personal lives, however unavoidable it may often become  – but in the hands of the writer, conflict is a gift. By looking at contemporary and classic literary texts to examine typical conflicts e.g. romantic, societal, internal we can analyse recurring motifs and techniques to see what can be applied to our own writing.  Texts for discussion will potentially include excerpts from Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams, Seesaw by Timothy Ogene, Sisters K by Maureen Sun and other texts tbc.

With ten minutes of free writing followed by literary discussion in the first segment, a moderated group sharing and support session in the second segment, followed by solo and pair exercises on impromptu dialogue with twenty minutes of further free writing in the third segment, there will be many opportunities to try something different and generate new writing in this day-long workshop.

Additional benefit: participants are very welcome to share 1000-2000 word excerpts from work in progress two weeks ahead of time, along with a 200 word summary of the context, in order to receive considered feedback, but this is not a requirement to take part in the course.

Leon Craig is the author of gothic short story collection Parallel Hells and queer haunted house novel The Decadence (both Sceptre UK). Her work has been published in Hazlitt, the London Magazine, the TLS and elsewhere. She has also worked in publishing as a Commissioning Editor. Leon is from London but now lives in Berlin.