This site contains a full set of topic sheets for Paddy Gormley's Exciting Writing courses for adults for the Greenwich Millennium Community Play and subsequently at the Blackheath Conservatoire of Music and the Arts: from 1999 until 2005. Since August 2005, he has been teaching creative writing, poetry and writing for performance at Crisis Skylight, London E1.

Paddy Gormley's book,
Language with Altitude,
is a further development of many of the ideas taught in his Exciting Writing classes.

Classes typically begin with a discussion on a specific topic. Paddy Gormley then uses the corrseponding topic sheet to summarise the points raised and to offer further perspectives on the subject. Students usually proceed to work on a practical exercise concerned with the subject previously discussed.

There are more than sixty topic sheets in all, covering a wide range of subjects: creative and analytical writing, verse and prose, stories, stage plays and radio.

For ease of reference, they are accessible here either by course or by subject. In other words, all the topic sheets for each course are listed together, in the order in which they were used, while there is a separate system that cross-references related topic sheets from different courses (e.g. radio dialogue, theatrical dialogue and dialogue as a plot development tool).

Click on any item in the following table to access the relevant topic sheets. For further ease of navigation, there is a system of right and left arrows to enable you to work forward or backwards through any course or category.