Due to popular demand, we’ve scheduled this additional course!
One of the hardest things about writing from experience – auto-fiction, memoir, the personal essay – is that it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the sequence of events and lose sight of the greater story. In this workshop, Nikesh Shukla – author, literary hero, and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature – will take you through all the elements essential to good storytelling. Focussing on character, conflict, tension, and a sense of place, participants will learn how to decide what’s important, and what’s not. A good story and a true story aren’t mutually exclusive, and this workshop is all about that delicate balance!
Participants will use writing exercises, memory association games, object prompts, and photographs to generate material and share work with each other. Rather than documenting events, you’ll spend time zooming in on themes, important detail, and nuance to create something beautifully written. This is no diary-writing workshop! Instead, we will cover techniques that will enable you to tell your story without compromising truth or memory.
This course is open to writers of any level of experience who want to work on a nonfiction project, or who aim to draw on their own experience to create fiction. An exclusive opportunity to work with an author at the top of his game, the workshop will be packed with exercises, discussion, tips, and techniques.
Come armed with something to write on and write with, an array of photographs from your life, and some key memories to work with.
To sign up, contact us at hello@thereaderberlin.com and make sure to specify that you’re interested in the Friday or Saturday session.
For those of you coming in from out of town, stay at gorgeous The Circus Hotel and receive 10% off your booking! Ask for our discount code.
Nikesh Shukla is the author of three novels. Most recently, he authored the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny (2018). His debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010. His second novel Meatspace was released to critical acclaim in 2014. Nikesh has written for The Guardian, Observer, Independent, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Vice, BBC2, LitHub, Guernica, and BBC Radio 4. Nikesh is also the editor of the bestselling essay collection,The Good Immigrant, which won the reader’s choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He is the author of two YA novels, Run, Riot and The Boxer. Nikesh was one of Time Magazine’s cultural leaders, Foreign Policy Magazine‘s 100 Global Thinkers and The Bookseller‘s 100 most influential people in publishing in 2016 and in 2017. He is the co-founder of the literary journal, The Good Journal, and The Good Literary Agency.
