Creative Writing: Defamiliarization & NLP

Little Picardy is hosting a creative writing workshop on Wednesday 2 December, running from 7:30 PM. The session focuses on defamiliarisation and NLP, two concepts that might sound like they belong in a linguistics lecture rather than a writing class, but they're both about how we look at the world and put it into words.

Defamiliarisation is the idea of taking something common — a kitchen table, a morning commute, the way someone holds a cup — and describing it as if you're seeing it for the first time. It's a way of stripping away the labels we slap on things until we're forced to actually look at them again. NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, deals with the patterns of how we use language to shape our perception and behaviour. When you put them together, you get a workshop that's as much about how you see as it is about how you write.

If you're someone who spends a lot of time staring at a blank page or feeling like your descriptions are leaning on the same old clichés, this is exactly the kind of thing that helps. It's less about 'how to write a novel' and more about the smaller, more precise tools you can use to change the way a scene lands on the page. You'll be working through exercises that push you to describe the ordinary in an extraordinary way, and thinking about how the specific words you choose change the way a reader experiences a moment.

It's a mid-week evening session, so it fits around a working day. The workshop is at Little Picardy, 18-22 Greenside Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3AA, and tickets start from £8.56.