Angela Doland
Date and Time: June 1, 2, and 10, 11, 2013, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Venue: HKU Shanghai Study Centre
Language: English
Enrollment deadline: May 15
Course Fee: HK$3,500 | Early Bird Fee: HK$2,500 (Before April 10th)
Course Description:
Whether you’re working on a travel story, a personal narrative or a serious journalistic feature, there’s one ingredient that will take your writing to a higher level: storytelling. The best reporters and non-fiction writers set scenes. Their characters face dilemmas. Their stories keep us riveted and have as much suspense as any fictional tale. In this four-day class, spread out over two weekends, we’ll do in-class writing exercises to break free of conventions and think about narrative.
We’ll workshop your stories. Using real-life examples from writers and reporters, we’ll talk about how to find and develop ideas, how to structure pieces and how to research stories in ways that make the telling easier, whether you’re working on travel features, memoirs, profiles or business stories. And we’ll unravel great writing by Peter Hessler, Barbara Demick, Atul Gawande, Gene Weingarten and others. How exactly do they do it?
For questions and the course fee bank transfer instruction, please send inquire to jmscsh@hku.hk, or call Lily Lu, director of JMSC Shanghai Centre, at (086)137 6134 2815.
Intended Learning Outcomes: By the end of the course, students should be able to:
Teacher’s Bio:
Angela Doland is a Shanghai-based journalist who has reported from Europe, Asia and Africa. In China, she contributes to outlets including CNN Travel and Advertising Age. Previously, she worked for 12 years as a Paris correspondent for Associated Press, covering events from the Concorde crash to the Cannes Film Festival, from terrorism in Morocco to a royal coronation in Monaco. She once flew to Tahiti to chase a missing basketball star; on another assignment, she joined Italian priests for an exorcism workshop. Doland holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Syllabus:
Day 1: Introduction to storytelling
Day 2: Before you write — great writing starts with great reporting
Day 3: The beginning, middle and end
Day 4: Getting your story out there