Susquehanna University’s 2018 Creative Writing Day

 Monday, October 22^nd, 2018. Registration is from 9-10am and the workshops conclude at 2:30pm, with a short, optional reception ending by 3pm. 

Please note that this program is offered at no cost to participants. We hope that you will alert juniors and seniors about this opportunity as well as alert teachers who could pass along this information to those who have a special interest in creative writing. Below, you will find an explanation of each of the workshops being offered at this year’s Creative Writing Day.  

We are happy to host students who wish to visit with their parents as well as students who come in small groups with a teacher. Creative Writing Day is designed to be a tool for those students who want to or are considering taking their passion for writing further and give them a chance to sample what life as a creative writing major or professional is like. (We’d love to be able to open the event up to larger numbers but are not able to do so because of limited capacity.)  

More information about the event, and a link to registration can be found here. We will be accepting registrations through Friday, Oct. 12. (Registration will close earlier if we reach maximum capacity prior to this date.) 

Please contact Codie Nevil Sauers at nevil@susqu.edu for more information

Susquehanna University’s 2018 Creative Writing Day Workshop Descriptions: 

Journalism: Whether you blog, participate in the school newspaper, or just rage against injustice on social media, you need to know the tips for and techniques of opinion writing. This workshop teaches you a common template for persuasive writing, and you'll leave with a publication-ready short opinion piece. 

Fantasy Novel Writing: Great novels have at their heart well-established and convincing settings. In this class, we will explore how to use observation, imagination, and language to create convincing worlds that are either fantastical or drawn from a historical time period that predates us all. This class is for anyone wanting to create a world for a fantasy, sci-fi, or historical novel. I'll include tips and insights that will help you get started on a story or perfect something you've been working on for some time. 

Novel: No. We are not going to write a novel in one class. But we can talk about the way novels work in contrast to short stories or short short stories or novella. How do they generally begin? What is the concept for a novel? What does the word "concept" even mean? Ah, the idea of a "Big Breath." But the basics of writing a novel are the same as for a short story: scene, scene, scene! Voice! Character! Exposition, sure. And the big one: plot! So, we will read a bit to sample all that. And then write to show what we've begun to learn. Just a beginning. But kind of cool. A way "in." 

Performance Writing: Time to dust off the soapbox and turn up the mic! In this workshop, we'll write performance pieces and practice our performance personas, while also exploring the rich tradition of oral history. All genres welcome and no performance experience required! 

Poetry: Poetry connects the body and its breath with the pen or pencil in the hand. From the pen-pencil to the page, into language, poetry is a visual and musical art. Emily Dickinson said: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." How does a writer achieve such an effect? In our poetry workshop we will experiment with poetic ways of answering this question! 

Screenwriting: Cinema is the story-telling language of the digital age. This workshop gives a basic introduction to writing feature film scripts: how to format scripts, what to include and leave out in set directions, and how to structure and execute a 120 minute visual story. 

Short Story: Here are the first few lines of a great story by author Lorrie Moore: "A beginning, an end: there seems to be neither. The whole thing is like a cloud that just lands and everywhere inside it is full of rain." This Short Story Workshop is an invitation and introduction to the cloud that just landed in your hands, and it's for anyone who writes or wishes to write fiction that can be read in a single sitting. 

Sports Journalism: Love sports and enjoy writing? Combine the two to explore sports journalism in a workshop that provides an overview of opportunities in the sports media field and introduces you to the basics of covering live sporting events and crafting athlete profiles.