Story Starters: Online Writing from Improv Course

Open – A class for anyone, regardless of their improv experience. Although more experienced players are of course welcome, the content does not require any prior improv knowledge.

In this class, we’ll use improv as a jumping-off point for your creative writing. An opportunity for you to make yourself turn up, improvise, and write EVERY week.

Inspiration will come from your own, and other people’s improv, and you’ll come out with ideas and starting points to pursue in your own time. It’s a buffet of writing genres, styles and techniques!

Each week, we’ll look at a different aspect of writing, using improvisation exercises and scenes to inspire and develop ideas. The exercises we do on zoom, may be familiar to you, but we’ll be using them in a different way – like magpies – stealing what works, what we like and discarding what we don’t.

Areas covered on this course include:

– Basic story arc and structure
– Ways to begin and the editor in the head
– Creating and building character
– Science fiction & the Fantastic (extraordinary/ordinary)
– History & Biography

Audience and Who’s Telling the Story?

You don’t have to have knowledge of any of these subjects, just turn up, play, and get some words on paper. Any form of writing is fine: prose, poetry, or something performative.

Toward the end of the course, you will also have the opportunity to send in a piece of writing for peer review (using constructive and positive guidelines), should you so choose.

Who’s this for?

Improvisers who write, or want to write, but need a butt-kick