The art of storytelling is both a skillset and a mindset. Taught by the award-winning Italian novelist Francesco Dimitri, this course will teach you how to live, breathe and think like a novelist.
It is said that everyone has a novel inside them – and it’s never too late to put pen to paper and share your vision with the world.
In order to become better storytellers we need to change not so much the way we write, as the way we think. How can a deft writer turn the most mundane events into gripping tales? What is the difference between a real person and a character, and how can we write a character who feels like a real person? And how can we deal with the long slog that is writing a novel?
Francesco Dimitri is here with answers. The award-winning author of critically acclaimed novels and non-fiction both in English and his native Italian, he joins How To Academy to teach you the psychological lessons every aspiring author needs to learn in order to tell compelling stories.
Session One: Looking at the World
The world is full of stories. Our mind is weaving narrative all the time – about strangers, about possible futures and a past that never was. Storytelling is always happening; storytellers know how to take control of the process. In this session we learn to observe the world the way a storyteller does, distilling events into ideas, people into characters, and life into plot.
Session Two: Looking at Ourselves
We are full of stories. Our fears, our dreams, our hopes, our anxieties, are part of the shared experience of humankind. Storytellers are endlessly examining themselves, looking for both universal traits and strange quirks. In this session we learn how to dig story material from within ourselves, at the same time avoiding the dangers of self-insertion.
Session Three: Putting It Together
Many start writing a novel, few get to the end. Writing stories is like running a marathon, and no athlete only trains their muscles: we need to develop other forms of resilience. In this session we learn how to be cope with bad writing, worse writing, rewriting, editing, writer’s block, and the assorted delights of a storyteller’s life. We learn how to give ourselves permission to start writing, and how to find the strength we need to push to the end.
