Course Outline
Online Programme in Creative Writing for Personal Development, Health and Well Being
Overview
This unique and practical course offers you the opportunity to explore your own creative writing within a framework of ideas, theories and concepts from personal development, health and well being.
The focus is on developing your own creative writing practice as a personal development tool, experimenting with new writing techniques and discovering insights about yourself and your writing within a supportive online environment.
According to your personal and professional interests, there will be suggestions and opportunities for further reading and discussion drawn from a stimulating and highly interdisciplinary field, which includes psychology and personal development as well as literary and narrative theory, novels, memoirs, autobiography (popular and literary) and poetry.
The flexible framework of the course means that you can follow your own personal interests and create an individual blend of practical writing, personal reflection and reading in key concepts and ideas.
How does it work?
Course format
Each course module will consist of the following elements:
Reading
Read module materials and select from texts suggested in the reading lists provided for each module. Read as much – or as little – as you want, according to your situation and interests.
Discussion
Contribute to the discussion forum for each module. Answer the questions posted by Sophie in the forum and discuss key ideas and your own personal experiences and reflections with your fellow course participants.
Writing
Engage in your own writing, in response to the exercises, writing prompts and ongoing feedback provided and any reading and research that you undertake.
Workshopping
Share selected samples of your writing in progress with course participants in the supportive online workshop space and receive feedback from Sophie and your fellow course participants.
Personal feedback
Each month, receive feedback from Sophie on selected pieces of your ongoing work, with regard to content, form and your personal writing journey.
Conference calls:
Three conference calls throughout the course provide opportunities for real-time group
discussion and questions.
What will I need to take part?
• An email address
• Access to a computer with internet connection (broadband recommended)
What will I learn?
The following is intended as a guide only since the nature of the course means that content can be varied to meet the developing interests and requirements of participants.
Part 1: Letting Go
This part of the course is designed to help you to let go of restrictive ideas about whom you – or the you who writes – might be. It will introduce you to techniques that will help you to free up both your writing and your experience of yourself; to move through ‘blocks’ and ‘stuckness’ in both writing and being; and to experiment with new ways of writing, creating and experiencing.
The emphasis in this part of the course is on the process of writing rather than the production of finished crafted pieces.
Module 1: Journaling, free-writing and expressive writing
This course module presents an overview of journaling and free-writing, including key journaling texts and ideas. It will introduce you to creative ways of using journaling and free-writing techniques such as ‘dialoguing,’ Sophie’s own Hypnotic Journaling process and using free-writing in groups. It will give you an overview of the relationship between ‘expressive writing’ and health and well being, with opportunities for further reading and discussion according to your personal or professional interests (for example, around key research by health care practitioners such as Pennebaker and Sarno).
Module 2: Writing the Body – Felt, Bodily Writing
This module will help you to develop your own regular creative writing practice. It will introduce you to theories and practices of creativity, primarily the relationship between bodily feelings and emotions and creativity and between creativity and physical well being. You will explore the idea of creativity as a regular practice that can be learned and developed and the ways that it might relate to other practices such as mindfulness, self-hypnosis, meditation and physical exercise.
There will be opportunities to explore theoretical frameworks for understanding your creativity through suggested readings in psychology, neuroscience and psychodynamic theory – but these are suggestions only! You do not need to study the theory in any great depth if this is not your interest. The emphasis throughout is on providing you with a safe space in which to explore your own practice of developmental creative writing.
Part 2: Making – Finding Form
In this part of the course you will begin to experiment with finding form for your felt experience and with finding the form, genre and voice that feels ‘right’ for you. You will be encouraged to play with prose and poetry – and anything in between – and to explore and discuss key concepts involved in writing from your life, including issues of personal truth and narrative point of view.
Module 3: Your Personal Truth
What is autobiography? What is life writing? What is the role of memory in our writing and experiencing? When we set out to write from our self-experience, can we ever tell the ‘truth’ or are all memories fictions? What are some of the ways that we can arrive at forms and stories that feel personally true and that are helpful for our well being?
These are some of the stimulating questions that you will be discussing in relation to your own writing and reading.
You will learn how to use the page as a holding space in order to play with the question of personal truth and identity – perhaps discovering in the process whom you really feel yourself to be rather than whom you think you ought to be.
Module 4: Telling and Re-Telling Your Self
How do we find the ‘right’ shape or fit for our self-experience? What happens when we begin to shape and craft our felt or free-writing into a narrative or story? Do we gain new insights into our stories when we tell them, for example, from another point of view?
Among the ideas that you will explore through writing exercises, readings and workshop discussions are:
• Who is the narrative ‘I’ – the I who writes?
• What are the different ways in which people have always written about their lives, from mythology and fairy-tales to sci-fi and popular fiction?
• How can we understand the current appetite for so-called ‘misery lit,’ ‘true life stories’ and the celebrity autobiography.
Part 3: Being Remade – Transformation
Module 5: Reading Our Selves
You will have the opportunity to reflect together upon what it feels like to read back over some of the work that you have written over the last few months – and how it feels to be read by others.
We will explore the difference between the process of writing and its products – words
on the page – and ask what the role of each plays in our own creative process.
Module 6: Writing and living
You will leave the course with a greater understanding of the particular role that writing can play in your life, how best this can be nurtured and how to continue a creative writing practice in the future – whether that is for personal development or publication, to be read by others or for your private exploration and/or reflection. Although there is no formal ‘assessment’ on this course, at this point there will be opportunities for a final feedback session from Sophie that will help you to reflect upon the personal journey that you have made and identify any specific areas that you may like to develop further.
All this for the special price of £299!
What you will receive for £299:
• Exclusive content that is not available anywhere else in the world and an unrivalled flexible learning environment.
• Individual feedback from an expert tutor who has pioneered research and work in this area.
• Lots of opportunity to share your experiences with like-minded people and learn from their feedback and ideas.
All for less than £50 per module!
The course fee represents six months’ of discussion, participation and workshopping in a unique online environment, monthly individual feedback on your written work from Sophie, plus regular feedback from Sophie and your fellow participants as part of the workshop and discussion forums. It includes reading lists for each module, which you are free to explore beyond the end of the course, and exclusive materials – writing prompts, exercises and inspiring module overviews – produced especially for the programme. These are not available anywhere else! I think you will agree that this is outstanding value.
How do I enrol now?
All you need to do next is call me on +44 (0)781 260 6350 or email me on sophie@sophienicholls.com or go straight to the registration form here.
The next course is scheduled to begin in October 2009. Places tend to fill fast so do register now if you’d like to make sure that you secure your place.