Writing Historical Short Stories Workshop at 2.30pm on Tuesday 12 September 2017

This is an opportunity for you to start writing a historical short story - a short story based on a historical incident or somebody in history.

I'll talk a bit about why to write historical short stories, whether to research, where to go for historical sources.

I'll read one of my short stories and talk about the difficulties I encountered.

More importantly, I'll provide examples of newspaper articles, excerpts of reports, a picture, a map, adverts, a letter, accounts, a census page, a 19th century poem and a prison diet to give you inspiration to write your own story.

Here's an example of a bit of a newspaper article:

There's lots of scope for imagining what led up to incidents, what impact it had on people, what happened afterwards and creating a story.

There'll be time for you to begin writing a short story and an opportunity for a few brave souls to summarise the example they chose and what they've done so far.

This is an event in the Borders Heritage Festival 2017 and you can download the Borders Heritage Festival programme.

As usual, there's a charge of £2 and there'll be tea and coffee and biscuits about halfway-through. The workshop begins at 2.30pm and ends about 4.30pm on Tuesday 12 September 2017.