Each of the five workshop themes, explained
What to expect from each workshop in 2025
As inspired by another Substack post I read this morning, I’ll quickly reintroduce myself for those of you who are new. I’m Jen Thorpe, a writer and researcher from Cape Town, South Africa. I’ve published two novels, a full length non-fiction book, edited three collections of feminist essays, and published three children’s books. I’m also a professionally qualified writer, with a Masters Degree in Creative Writing. You can find out more about all that on my website.
My workshops are a space for you to arrive with a blank page and write in any format you like — prose, poetry, non-fiction, memoir. You’ll leave with at least five new pieces of writing done, and these can either be brand new or part of a longer work in progress. Whatever your project, you’ll have some new writing!
You do not need any experience writing, or any experience being in a writing workshop to write. I can't emphasise this enough. All you have to have is the will to write, and the courage to give it a try.
Themes for the workshops in 2025
In every workshop we will sit down and complete a series of writing exercises. These will be structured around a theme (see the image below). The theme is there to guide me in sharing activities, prompts, quotes and insights that I will share. The writing you do, however, is totally up to you.
5 and 18 July - Character
Writing powerful characters is a surefire way to hook a reader - if you can get someone to care what happens to a character you’ve made up they will keep reading. Even when the writing is not perfect. In this workshop we’ll play with:
Creating a character, or many characters, from scratch.
Answering questions about our characters and as our characters to get to the heart of their desires, motivations, and actions.
Working on different layers of character development - from the obvious demographic ones to the inner and external arcs of your character in a storyUsing images to stimulate creativity.
Using objects to imbue a character with personality, and to prompt your writing in the future.
Focussing on the way we talk about our character’s actions, and how choice of word can make all the different.
Putting your character in conversation to show how they think, feel, and act and the differences between these.
Sharing great excerpts of writing that I think reveal character, and tips and tricks from other writers.
Building rising tension in your character’s life as a way of driving plot forward.
You’ll leave with the potential to have developed five characters, or really worked hard on one to bring them to life. You’ll have created a poem. You’ll have an envelope full of prompts to take forward in the days ahead to make sure that you keep writing.
2 and 15 August - World, Setting, Place
Where our stories take place matters, for the reader who seeks novelty or familiarity, and for the characters themselves. In this workshop we’ll play with:
Micro and macro worldbuilding — great for those of you who are writing fantasy, speculative fiction, magical realism, or anything slightly different from the world as you know it. These exercises are useful too for anyone writing more realist fiction because they make you consider your assumptions about setting and place, and what it means for your story and characters.
Using your senses to make your story setting come alive — great for you if you’re writing scenes that are unfamiliar to your protagonists, or if you’re hoping to make your writing a bit richer. Also great if you’re writing non-fiction, and want to convey to the reader how it feels to inhabit a particular place.
Rubbing up against your characters with setting and to see how it affects their actions — great if you’re feeling stuck with a character, or your character is feeling stuck. For those of you who have attended in July, you can work on characters you’ve already built, or on creating some new ones.
Exploring how setting and place can create an atmosphere and mood for your story — sometimes our setting can become a character in itself, and it can help to create dramatic tension.
How setting can be the backbone of a story, setting you up with a plot.
Devices to create a realistic setting, and some cliches to avoid.
You’ll leave with some writing that creates vivid, meaningful settings for your story, and may even spark some new plots or characters for you.
13 and 19 September - Feeling, vibe, mood
This is probably the most woo woo of all of this year’s workshops themes and I invite you to come along with me and GET CREATIVE. In this workshop we’ll play with:
Sentence length and how it can create emotion or a sense of your character’s headspace.
Using music to prompt a particular mood in a story (as well as the nitty gritty of using songs in your books and stories from a publishing perspective), and creating a playlist for your project.
Using smell and fragrance to create believable characters, settings, and scenes.
How different story structures can create different feelings.
An exploration of genre and how it can determine what your reader expects from a story.
Linking character, setting, and feeling to create an atmosphere.
How to raise the stakes for your character to add drama and feeling.
You’ll leave with some brand new writing that gets to the emotional depths of a story, and moves people.
25 and 31 October - Dialogue
When you have worked out your character’s voice, and the way they interact with other characters in a story, you can really start to have a lot of fun. In this workshop we’ll play with:
Trying out different ways that a character speaks - their vocabulary, their tone of voice, their sentence length.
Exploring things to try and to avoid when writing dialogue.
Sharing some great examples of dialogue from fiction, non-fiction, and memoir.
Putting oppositional characters in conversation with each other to build tension.
Looking at how to use and reference modern ways of communicating in your story.
You’ll leave with fresh writing that gets your characters in conversation, moving your plot forward, and helping us to invest more deeply in the story you’re telling.
22 and 28 November - Form and story structure
This workshop is going to explore how to write different forms of stories, and what types of writing they’re useful for, as well as some of the common ‘tricks’ of each form. Some of the forms I’d like us to play with are:
Diary
Flash
Prose poem
Memoir
Novel
Short story
Haiku
You’ll leave with writing in forms that you may never have tried before, and a better understanding of the potential of many types of writing. I’ll also share as much as I can about word lengths, publishing opportunities, and interesting examples of these from South Africa and around the world.