Creative Writing

Prolific author Tanika Gupta talks about stagecraft, highlighting the importance of voice and comic idiom in her writing.

Playwright Helen Blakeman sees setting as integral to a play’s success and highlights the supporting importance of factors such as structure and voice.

Playwriting master Alan Ayckbourn reveals how he develops and connects ideas for his plays, and the meticulous process of structuring and ‘building’ a script.

Ayckbourn's approach to redrafting and rewriting scripts, and how dramatic ideas and twists emerge.

Alan Ayckbourn's work as a director, and how this informs his writing. The economy of playwriting, and the writer’s awareness of the limitations of the stage.

Drawing on his intimate knowledge of the theatre, Alan Ayckbourn offers an insight into the varius methods of staging, drawing a link between his own work and theatre in the round.

Renowned writer David Edgar discusses his ideas on Aristotle’s unities, linking this to ways of adapting existing works.

Novelist and playwright Jane Rogers talks about the transition of one of her novels, Mr. Wroe’s Virgins, into a four part television series.

Jane Rogers talks about her work as a novelist, and the methods of storytelling and voice she employs. She brings together various forms and approaches, such as the use of cinematic editing techniques, in her novels

Jane Rogers talks about her work in terms of viewing herself as a contemporary novelist. She draws links to literary greats, and techniques like 'the unreliable narrator'.

Dorothy Sheridan, director of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, talks about the archive in terms of a research tool and a repository of unique material.

Author Liz Jensen talks about her novels and how they develop in terms of storyline, plot, character and voice, How she often rejects planning in favour of a more organic approach to her work.

Novelist Liz Jensen talks about narrative viewpoints, and their benefits and shortcomings in terms of storytelling.

Poet and presenter Ian McMillan takes a light-hearted look at the use of repetition in his poems.

Ian McMillan talks about the importance and use of surrealism in his poetry.

Hilary Mantel talks about the importance and influence television and film have had on her development as a writer. The paragraph as the basic building block of fiction, and how this can generate a successful narrative.

Hilary Mantel uses examples and a reading from her own novel Vacant Possession, to examine the use of rhetoric and rhythm, and how they can seed ideas in a reader and build up the relationship between reader and text.