While Ali was having fun at the Bloomsday Festival talk at the Dublin Writers' Museum yesterday, I was taking part in one of the weekend courses at the centre: Beginning the Novel, which was taught by Catherine Dunne. I've been toying with the idea of writing a novel for an embarrassingly long time, so the opportunity to take a course on the subject was too tempting to resist. The course was very well structured, and as it was a small class, there was plenty of opportunity for each person to receive a lot of feedback on their writing. Some of the exercises were a little daunting - attempting to sum up the plot of an as-yet unwritten novel in five sentences is not exactly the easiest thing in the world - but we certainly got a lot of feedback from Catherine, and she provided some genuinely great advice on how to improve what we had already written. A lot of information was packed into a short space of time - it was a very intensive couple of days - and if you're thinking about taking one of these courses in the autumn, I'd highly recommend it.
