This writing course, The Inner Life of Fiction with Emily Maguire, will take place at Writing NSW in Sydney over 6x Tuesdays: 28 April; 5, 12, 19, 26 May; 2 June (6:30pm-9:30pm).
Whether you’re working on a novel, short stories, or starting fresh, this is a chance to deepen your craft and push your writing to the next level.
Each session of this six-week course with writer Emily Maguire will focus on a core element of literary craft, helping you develop new skills and a sharper awareness of your own style. Through guided close reading, in-class discussion and writing exercises, you’ll explore how sentences create rhythm, how images shape emotion, how voice determines distance and how subtext transforms even the quietest scene. You’ll also develop skills to revise your work with clarity and intention. The course is suitable for writers of any background who want to strengthen their prose, develop a more distinctive voice and gain confidence on the page.
Week-by-Week Course Breakdown
Week 1: The Sentence as a Creative Act
What makes a sentence compelling, alive and meaningful?
We begin at the level of the sentence, exploring it not as a container for information but as the primary engine of meaning, rhythm and emotional charge. Through close readings of writers with distinct styles we’ll examine how rhythm, syntax and diction create momentum and mood. In-class exercises will help you develop a heightened, conscious relationship to your own prose style and explore for yourself the expressive possibilities within a single sentence.
Week 2: Image, Metaphor and Sensory Precision
How do you make writing vivid without excess?
This week turns to vividness and restraint: how to create prose that feels alive without becoming excessive. We’ll explore the difference between abstract and concrete detail, and look at how writers transform description into evocation. We’ll also examine what distinguishes fresh metaphor from cliché and practice transforming worn imagery into arresting language to make prose vivid without overwriting.
Week 3: Voice, Distance and Point of View
How does a story’s voice shape the reader’s emotional experience?
This class is all about voice, interiority and the interplay between authorial and character consciousness. We’ll also explore narrative distance and how shifts in proximity alter intimacy and authority. Writing exercises will have you manipulating point of view with clarity and precision and beginning to develop a strong and specific voice on the page.
Week 4: Scene, Subtext and the Power of What’s Unsaid
How to create emotional tension without melodrama?
This week focuses on the anatomy of a literary scene and the quiet mechanics of subtext — how dialogue, gesture and silence communicate what characters cannot (or will not) say. We’ll look at how writers shape emotional beats, build micro-tension and create scenes in which the primary action is internal. Through writing exercises you’ll practice introducing sub-text and using restraint and implication to create emotional depth.
Week 5: Pattern, Symbol and Meaning
How do stories create resonance beyond their literal events?
In this class, we explore how patterns, motifs and symbolic echoes create meaning that extends beyond the literal. We’ll read works in which objects, weather, colour and setting function as emotional circuitry, carrying thematic charge without heavy-handed symbolism. You’ll write a micro-story or scene anchored in a symbolic object and think about how to unobtrusively weave thematic threads through your longer works.
Week 6: Revision as Art: Refining Voice, Clarity and Resonance
How do you transform a good draft into a powerful one?
In our final week we talk about revision as an intensely creative act. We’ll examine how accomplished writers approach macro and micro revision and discuss how to find the ‘heat’ in your own work, as well as what diffuses it. Through guided, craft-focused peer feedback and a mini line-editing workshop you will transform a draft from an earlier session into a polished piece and gain a comprehensive, practical revision process you can apply to all future writing.
Expected Learning Outcomes
In this six-week course, participants will:
- Strengthen their understanding of how core elements of craft, including voice, point of view, scene, subtext and imagery work to create compelling fiction
- Develop a sharper awareness of their own stylistic tendencies and experiment with techniques to strengthen clarity, narrative drive and distinctiveness on the page
- Learn strategies for revising and refining their work with intention and confidence.
Participant Requirements
Pen and paper, or a fully charged device. Please read our FAQ before enrolling.
If you have questions about this course, please contact us.
For more information click here
