Let's Keep It Short - A Creative Writing Workshop

Playpen Performing Arts Trust presents 'Let's Keep It Short' - An intensive creative short story writing workshop with author, scholar & editor - Niti Sampat Patel. About the workshop conductor: Niti Sampat Patel Niti Sampat-Patel has a PhD in Literature and Cinema Studies from New York University and has taught both film and literature in the USA and India. Her first book, “Postcolonial Masquerades: Culture and Politics in Literature, Film, Video and Photography” was published by Garland/Routledge in 2001. Subsequently she was part of the editorial team for the “Encyclopedia of South Asian Writing” published by Greenwood Press and has contributed scholarly articles to various anthologies and journals around the world. Her first work of fiction, “Moon Goddess”, published in 2017, is an epic novel that spans India, USA and Lebanon. Echoing the structure of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, it chronicles the lives of several generations of women and examines the nature of memory and violence as characters attempt to reconstruct the past. Niti Sampat-Patel lives and writes in Bombay and the USA and is currently working on her second novel, “The Color of Sunset”. Let's Keep It Short - Workshop Objectives The workshop aims to help aspiring writers build a personal writing style and produce a complete short story by the end of the sessions! It is a fun yet intensive creative experience using writing exercises to facilitate creative processes. Given below are the workshop objectives, 1. Helping writers in discovering their own unique writing style. 2. Understanding how to develop characters and have them go through change in the limited word count. 3. Understanding the structure of the plot of a short story and how to emphasize specific moments of importance. 4. Editing and proofreading so as to include only pertinent content that creates interest in the reader/audience. 5. Modules - Developing ideas, story openings, conflict, character development, dialogue, point of view, plot, setting and structure, editing. 6. Additionally, (if the participants opt for it) we can offer them the opportunity to convert their work into a dramatic text and provide a platform for sharing it.