Writing Short Stories 2025

We are really looking forward to welcoming you to ‘Writing Short Stories’ with Vanessa Onwuemezi. 

What is a short story? How can we use the basic elements of the craft: tense, point of view and metaphor, to name a few, to craft a story that will live with the reader way beyond its word count? During this course, Vanessa Onwuemezi will guide you towards new potential in your writing by addressing these questions and by looking at how other writers have navigated them. Using writing exercises and discussion she will create a space in which you can take creative risks through the writing process. 

JOINING INFO

The key details of the course are below, as well as the link you’ll need to join each class.. 

When: 12th November - 3rd December, 7:00pm to 8:30pm, Online (UK Time)

Where: Online

Joining Link: Writing Short Stories | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams

You can download Teams free on your computer, or join via the web: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-teams/download-app 

PREP

Vanessa has asked if you can please bring an object with you to the first workshop.

BOOK BUNDLE

As part of your course fee you are entitled to a copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook and a copy of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' and Artists' Companion. Please send me your address and we will get your books in the post! 

SLACK

Finally, we will be using Slack during the course, which is a free, easy-to-use platform that enables everything related to the course to be stored in one place. Please click on the below link to gain access to the Slack workspace that we’ve created for this course:

https://join.slack.com/t/writingshorts-wpy7463/shared_invite/zt-3g4e7nfid-zQm7F_LvM7vhfz9uZB9djA 

When you arrive in Slack you’ll see the workspace is called ‘Writing Short Stories’, with several channels within that workspace. A quick bit of guidance on how these different channels will work:

• Course Etiquette: We’ve put together some course etiquette guidelines. Please have a read and comment to confirm that you’ve seen them.
• General: This is a general discussion board. Vanessa, James and myself will all have access but it’s not something we’re going to get involved in. This is for you guys to chat amongst yourselves, discuss, share advice and book recommendations! A great way to start would be to introduce yourselves, share info about your writing journeys so far and let the rest of the group know what you’re working on and why you’re here.
• Writing Course: We will be sharing the homework in here each week for your reference, as well as recordings of every class.

Everyone involved in the course will have access to all channels by default. It’s therefore important to make Slack work for you, so please take a bit of time to manage your notifications. You can do this by right-clicking on the channel and then selecting ‘Change notifications’.

We will also be sharing recordings and homework by email, but this is a space for you guys to connect with each other and build your writing community. Myself and James will also be available via email so if you’d prefer to reach out to us via email then please do get in touch.