The Portable Creative Writing Workshop

How do writers practice? What do they do to warm up? When they have no ideas, do they write at all? Whether you belong to a writing workshop running low on steam, or you're struggling to continue working on your own, The Portable Creative Writing Workshop offers a wide range of games and exercises to help stimulate you in your writing.

In three main sections covering The Raw Material, Poetry and Fiction, prize-winning poet and fiction writer Pat Boran takes a hands-on approach to the creative writing process, not only explaining many of the techniques and central concepts (from rhyme and rhythm, through scenes and dialogue to plot and resolution), but showing how these can be put to work in your writing.

In addition, for the fourth section, Pat Boran is joined by more than two dozen other Irish and international poets, fiction writers and playwrights - including Maeve Binchy, Eavan Boland, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Heaney and Marina Warner - who offer their own writing ideas and advice.

Creative writing can be a lonely activity. Sit down to it and, even in a crowded room, you're on your own. But if you'd welcome a supportive, encouraging and at times challenging companion, this is the book for you.

Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland, in 1963 and presently lives in Dublin where he is Writer in Residence at Dublin City University. He has also conducted creative writing workshops throughout Ireland in schools, colleges, prisons and with groups of writers of all ages, backgrounds and levels. A previous editor of Poetry Ireland Review and presenter of the RTE television books programme Undercover, he was the recipient of the 1989 Patrick Kavanagh Award for poetry, and has published four collections of poems, the most recent of which is The Shape of Water (1996), a volume of short stories Strange Bedfellows (1991), a recent short fiction for children and four non-fiction books, including, as Daniel Hynes, A Short History of Dublin (1997).