Events › How to Begin: Inspiration as Process with Jasmine Sealy

When we talk about inspiration we usually think of it as an external influence, something over which we have no control. Ideas “come to us” or we are “struck by the muse.” But what if we reframed our thinking around inspiration so that it instead became an integral part of our writing practice? 

In this workshop we will employ an Aristotelian framework to demystify the creative process and explore practical and useful strategies to go from the ideation stage to words on the page. We’ll talk about finding an outlining process that works for you (even if that means not outlining at all) and how to find the beginning of your story (even when you’re lost in the middle).

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Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian-Canadian writer. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the UBC School of Creative Writing where she won the 2020 UBC/HarperCollinsCanada Best New Fiction Prize. Her debut novel The Island of Forgetting was published in 2022. It was named a best book of 2022 by the CBC, The Globe and Mail and The Sunday Times in the UK. It was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It won the 2023 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.

Creative Writing Classes at VPL provide open, friendly, creative spaces for book lovers and aspiring writers of all levels