Making the impossible real

Writing Speculative Fiction
Tutor: Robert Hood
When: Sunday 4 March-10am-4pm

Whether dealing with angels or demons, past or future, aliens, post-humans or artificial intelligences, stories of alternate realities, imagined futures and fantastical impossibilities have been a never-ending source of fascination for writers and readers for as long as humanity has told stories. But once you leave the everyday world behind, once you embrace worlds where the impossible happens, how do you make your writing believable? How do you make the impossible possible?

Award-winning, internationally published writer Robert Hood has wrestled with these issues in his own work. Variously referred to as “a brilliant fantasist”, “Australia’s master of dark fantasy” and “Aussie horror’s wicked godfather”, Rob has written stories of ghosts, robots, monsters, aliens and many other fantastical entities, even human beings – equally at home in the various genres that we refer to as “speculative fiction”: science fiction, fantasy and fantastical horror, for both adults and children.

In this one-day course, Rob will share his insights into how to make your wildest imaginings real. More than startling ideas or bizarre speculation, these genres require the same attention to characterization, plot development, dialogue, scene-setting, style and thematic resonance as all fiction – but with special qualities unique to themselves. The course offers practical exercises that will help you develop these qualities, as well as exploring questions of particular relevance to new authors, such as sources for ideas, manuscript presentation, getting published and the pitfalls that should be avoided at all cost.

Information on cost etc. as well as booking details can be found on the NSW Writers’ Centre website.

 

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