Dates: 13-14 October 2012

Duration: 2 days; 10am-5pm

Location: Guardian offices, King's Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9GU

Course price: £299.00 (inclusive of VAT and booking fee)

Maximum number of places per session: 20

Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.

This course will examine the essential questions which must be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read. Although we shall explore the use of pictures as a key element, the primary focus will be on writing.

Course structure

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?

2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?

3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?

4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.

5. How to write a pen portrait - Drawing on The Gentle Author's experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.

6. What a blog can do - A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.

Tutor profile

Little is known of the enigmatic Gentle Author but every reader knows that the Gentle Author is their confidante and friend who tells the candid stories of the remarkable people to be found in Spitalfields. Since August 2009, the Gentle Author has posted every single day, writing over nine hundred stories at Spitalfields Life in pursuit of a promise to complete ten thousand over the next quarter century. A compendium of one hundred and fifty favourite stores has recently been published as a handsome illustrated hardback by Saltyard Books, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.