Creative Writing Course with Thomas McMullan

by Patrick Fysh

 

This autumn, Store 104 will be hosting a creative writing course with award-winning local author Thomas McMullan. The course will cost £150 per person and will run for eight weeks. Sessions will last two hours, taking place here in the store on Tuesday evenings from 6:30pm until 8:30pm. The course take place from the 4th of October to the 22nd of November. 


This course is ideal for beginner writers, or for more experienced writers seeking to develop their skills. The sessions will involve exercises that are designed to help bring out your creativity, and to introduce crucial elements of various kinds of creative writing - from crafting compelling characters and snappy dialogue, to playing with imagery and perspective.

Each session will also involve discussion of pieces of writing, understanding different literary techniques with an aim of applying these to your own creative work. You will learn to respond to writing thoughtfully and will produce your own pieces in a range of different forms, from fiction to poetry.

The eight week course will consist of:

  • Two weeks on fiction
  • Two weeks on poetry
  • Two weeks on scriptwriting
  • Two weeks of final workshopping, where participants are given the opportunity to receive critical feedback and guidance on a short project they have developed over the length of the course, either fiction, poetry or script-based.

A Google Classroom will be set up for the duration of the course. This will allow us to share material and chat outside of the sessions. It also means any questions can easily be answered either by Ellie here at Store 104 or by Thomas.

There are twelve places available on our Creative Writing Workshop, and tickets can be purchased here.

Thomas McMullan is a writer and an artist. His debut novel, The Last Good Man (Bloomsbury) won the 2021 Betty Trask Prize and was praised as ‘A Scarlet Letter for our times’ by Margaret Atwood. His short fiction and poetry have been published in 3:AM Magazine, Lighthouse and Best British Short Stories, and his journalistic work has appeared in publications including the Guardian, The Observer, Times Literary Supplement, Frieze and BBC News. He has also worked with theatre companies and games studios in London, Amsterdam and Los Angeles, including Roll7, Punchdrunk and The Chinese Room.

Some of you may know Thomas through our book club, or perhaps attended our Q&A event with him back in November of last year. However, we have attached his website here with more information regarding his work: Thomas McMullan. You can also find Thomas’ award winning novel on our website by following this link: The Last Good Man at Store 104.

Praise for The Last Good Man:

‘A Scarlet Letter for our times: The Last Good Man, by Thomas McMullan. Zamyatin's We meets Lord of the Flies meets De Toqueville meets cancel culture meets spite and malice meets Jesus. Should words be power? Justice or Mercy? What price rage?’
- MARGARET ATWOOD

‘An extraordinary and disquieting work of imagination, and as original as any novel I've read in recent memory … The Last Good Man makes visible the dark matter of our troubled zeitgeist, and the cruelty that animates moral community’
- ROB DOYLE

‘A dark, compelling novel about the only two things humans really have to fear: each other, and being alone ... McMullan has a sureness with violence that puts him in the company of Sarah Moss and Benjamin Myers...The Last Good Man is viciously captivating: frightening to be around, impossible to put aside.’
- THE GUARDIAN: *Book of the day*

‘A gruesome, disenchanted debut … McMullan combines the well-worn conceits of provincial claustrophobia and rural gothic with our contemporary politics of collective outrage, call-out culture and alternative facts … A fast-paced, engaging novel.’
- TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘[A] brilliantly unsettling parable about how we police our societies through violence, language and shame.’
- THE INDEPENDENT

‘Innovative and timeless... eerie and atmospheric’
- THE IRISH TIMES

‘An arresting debut…a clean, crackling novel.’
- THE METRO: "

‘A visceral and disquieting debut novel about the power of words...should be read by anyone who uses the internet.’
- NEW STATESMAN

‘An impressively taut, thoughtful novel... He writes with a muscular lyricism; the book’s moral gaze is both pitiless and ambivalent.’
- 3:AM MAGAZINE

‘[A] thought-provoking debut... A shivery sense of menace exerts steady fascination in McMullan’s dark allegory of the social-media age.’
- MAIL ON SUNDAY

‘The Last Good Man is an essential and commanding slice of folk horror — a wholly successful exercise in world-building that straddles an uncomfortable line between reality and fantasy.’
- LUNATE

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