Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. Mike’s previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Notes from a Coma (2005), and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2016 his latest novel Solar Bones won The Goldsmiths Prize and the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Most recently, Solar Bones has been shortlisted for The Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award 2017. Mike currently teaches fiction at the MA in Writing course at NUI Galway, and recently he has taken up the directorship of the university’s BA with Creative Writing programme.
On Saturday 25th March 2017 Mike will be curating a writing workshop entitled ‘The Bones of Fiction’ @ 2.30pm, in the dlr Lexlcon, at the Mountains to Sea Book Festival in Dun Laoghaire, and tickets are 25 euro each.
There will be a range of issues explored in the workshop, and the following questions will be addressed:
All stories belong to people or, as we say in fiction writing, characters. But how do we find and develop these characters? How do they take on a credible life of their own so that the reader can empathise with them? What kind of story arc enables a character to best develop as a living, breathing presence? How do these characters change and grow across the length and breadth of a novel or a short story? And when it comes to an end, how do we recognise the end, when do we know that a story is over?
The workshop will involve reading and writing exercises on how we can bring our characters to the surface of our work. A range of compositional experiments will be attempted, and revision techniques will be explored. The main objective of the workshop is that participants will leave with an enhanced range of ideas and experimental techniques that will further their own writing projects.
You can reach Mike on Facebook @authormikemccormack
To find out more about the festival, check out their Twitter page @mountainstosea