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Writing

The Art of Storytelling - november 2025

By Jean-Marie Laclavetine

Atelier écriture Domaine de Cazenac
Atelier écriture Laclavetine Domaine de Cazenac
Atelier écriture Domaine de Cazenac

The Workshop

Jean-Marie Laclavetine, one of the leading contemporary French novelists, invites you to take part in his writing workshop from Monday 17th to Friday 21st of March 2025. This highly anticipated first workshop, already meeting with great success, offers a unique immersion in the art of storytelling.
Over five days, in a calm and inspiring environment, Jean-Marie Laclavetine will guide you through practical exercises and group workshops to explore the mechanics of narrative, the structure of storytelling, and the craft of writing. 

Whether you are a beginner or a more experienced writer, this workshop will help you develop your own voice and refine your style under the guidance of a recognized author.
This workshop is an opportunity to create, share, and grow alongside a passionate and experienced writer.

The writer's word:

This immersion workshop offers participants personalized guidance in the practice of literary writing. The goal is not to provide an infallible recipe for writing a novel, but to help each individual to move forward in their personal reflection and develop their own tools for crafting a novel, a story, or a short story. The work will be based on texts produced on-site, or on excerpts from ongoing literary projects. Learning to write is, above all, a personal journey. It is about becoming aware of the unique powers of writing: a tool for exploration, understanding of the world, a source of anxiety, but also an instrument of pleasure, surprise, and laughter.

The proposed exercises will provide a foundation for reflection applicable to any literary writing practice: choosing the right word, seeking conciseness, precision, and effective metaphors, etc. We will also focus on more specific aspects of novel writing: the opening (incipit), the various phases of narrative development, the ending, choosing a title, using tenses, intermediate scenes, the issue of narrative point of view... 

The exercises will be tailored to the personalities of the participants and the evolving dynamics of the group. The objective is to enable each participant to progress on an ongoing literary project or to initiate a new project, inspired by the reflections generated during the workshop.

Interested
Atelier écriture Domaine de Cazenac

Stay essentials

  • Duration: From Monday, March 17 to Friday, March 24, 2025
  • Accommodation: Château de Cazenac, prestigious rooms
  • Activities: Immersion and personalized support in the practice of literary writing.
  • Services: Gourmet meals, access to sauna, swimming pool, and tennis.

equipment

  • Laptop

Rate

Price: €1500 per participant includes accommodation and meals from Monday evening to Friday morning.

About
Jean-Marie Laclavetine

Atelier écriture Laclavetine Domaine de Cazenac

Jean-Marie Laclavetine was born in Bordeaux in 1954. A novelist and short story writer, he has been a member of the editorial committee of Gallimard Publishing since 1989. In this role, he has helped bring many French-language writers to prominence (Jean-Christophe Rufin, Carole Martinez, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Muriel Barbery, Boualem Sansal, Dai Sijie, David Foenkinos, Tristan Garcia, Leïla Slimani, Joffrine Donnadieu…). He has won numerous literary awards, including the 1999 Goncourt Prize for Lycéens for Première ligne and the Grand Prix for short stories from the French Academy for Le Rouge et le Blanc, a collection of short stories about the world of wine. He is also an Italian translator.

His last two books, Une amie de la famille (Marguerite Duras Prize) and La vie des morts, were published by Gallimard in 2019 and 2021. Since 2012, he has been leading writing workshops at Gallimard Publishing.

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