Recent classes
Masterclass Series on Zoom in 2024 and in 2025 with dates to be confirmed.
* Endings, 9 December 2024
* Genres & Readers, 11 November 2024
* Showing & Telling, 14 October 2024
* Perspective & Style, 16 September 2024
* Form & Structure, 10 June 2024
* Story & Plot, 14 May 2024
* Setting & Situation, 8 April 2024
* Character, 4 March 2024
* Voice, 5 February 2024
* Beginnings, 8 January 2024
More information on this series of masterclasses can be found in this post on my blog.
Past workshops and events
Magicians and Fools: Tarot for Writers
17 September 2023
Hastings Book Festival
The Four Elements of Revising
14 October 2023
With Words Away at the Phoenix Garden, London WC2
Nature Matters: Writing in Nature, Nature in Writing
11 March 2023
With Words Away at the Phoenix Garden, London WC2
Reawakenings: A Four Elements workshop
26 November 2022
With Words Away at the Phoenix Garden, London WC2
Everyday Magic: The Four Elements of Creativity
16 September 2022
The Hastings Book Festival
Revising and Editing
25 April 2022
Salon with Words Away at the Teahouse Theatre, Vauxhall, London
The Four Elements of Editing
Online, Wednesday 21 July
A workshop for The Literary Consultancy’s Being A Writing programme on approaches to revising and self-editing using the Four Elements practice.
Words In Action
Online, Monday 11 January
Talking to Kellie Jackson of Words Away about mindful and holistic approaches to writing, paying special attention to taming our monkey minds, integrating feedback, and submitting our manuscripts to agents and publishers.
Perfect Plotting
Online, Wednesday 24 June 2020, 4pm-6pm and Tuesday 30 June 2020, 4pm-6pm
Online workshop with The Literary Consultancy: how to structure your book – plot, story, and the mechanics of storytelling.
Water Workshop
Cambridge University, 18 February 2020
A half-day version of Water Ways.
Water Ways: A Four Elements Workshop on Feeling, Tone and Perspective
8 February 2020
Water is the element associated with emotions and the mysterious world of the unconscious, and in this workshop we shall tap into memories, dreams, and the workings of our inner lives to bring greater feeling into our writing by:
* charging our work with powerful symbols and representations of Water
* shifting tone and perspective to change the pitch of a story
* crafting sentences that convey a range of feelings
* balancing Water with the elements of Fire, Earth and Air to ensure that emotions are channeled purposefully throughout
Also in the studio will be resident wavemaker Sally Kindberg, comic-strip maker and author/illustrator of over thirty children’s books. She will introduce us to practical techniques from illustration that will add feeling and fresh insights to our work.
Writes at the Museum Food: Bigger Than The Page,
at the Victoria & Albert Museum (inspired by the V&A’s recent exhibition Food: Bigger Than The Plate), 26 January 2020
This workshop explores new ways of thinking about food as inspiration for our writing. We’ll investigate how food activates all the senses, and we’ll also consider its symbolic powers and collective energies. We’ll talk about food writing as a literary genre, and look at the wider uses of food in fiction and poetry. And most of all we’ll write: cooking up memories, recycling recipes as poems, and harvesting stories from the compost of our desires.
Finding Your Fire: A Four Elements Workshop on Theme and Voice
9 November 2019
This workshop intuitively explores the symbolic power of Fire in our writing and creative process. We’ll consider how Fire can:
* sustain the creative energy of our writing practice, from initial spark to final draft
* help to deepen the intention and draw out the theme within our writing
* bring life to aspects of craft such as voice, dialogue and characterisation
* not only fuel conflict but also critique its role in our stories
Everyday Magic: The Four Elements of Creativity
28 September, 2019
Would you like to add a spark of magic to your writing? We’ll explore a variety of writing practices, inspirations, and departure points, including meditation, memory, fairy tales and the tarot. Summoning new powers to free our intuition, we’ll bring depth, texture, and balance to our writing by working holistically with the Four Elements:
* Fire – to power our voices and strengthen our intention
* Water – to evoke feeling and connect with readers
* Earth – to embody all the senses with detail and action
* Air – to bring focus and structure to our stories
Craft masterclasses
During 2018/2019 I ran a sequence of six one-day craft masterclasses with Words Away, designed to use intuitive approaches to the craft topics that might be covered in seminars for an MA or MFA in creative writing: Plotting; Voice; Character and Setting; Prose and Literary Style; Space and Time (advanced techniques in fiction); Revising and Self-Editing. We hope to repeat these again in the future.