Creative writing workshops, winter/spring 2025
(obligatory January post about upcoming online courses)
Sometimes when I am not having thoughts about TV or books or musicals (it happens), I am delivering creative writing workshops, online as well as in the ‘real world’ for schools, libraries, festivals, etc. 2025 marks 25 years (eep) of doing writing-related events - I started off doing school and library author visits, which I still do occasionally, but the thing I really love is working with people on their own writing (and not talking about my own). As in, getting them to write stuff (creating the space, the conditions that makes it more possible to do that). Giving specific advice on a particular piece of work and/or helping to identify people’s strengths and need-to-work-on areas in general. Further down the line, offering suggestions about publishing and navigating submissions.
Creating is good for us, as humans, and sometimes we might need or want or benefit from support in our creative endeavours. I feel like if you’re the sort of person who subscribes to Substack newsletters, or at least if you’re the sort of person reading this one, you’re probably on board with this already - I know some of you are people who’ve taken courses and workshops with me in the past, and it is always lovely to see your names pop up. So can we skip that bit and just let me do the thing where I tell you what’s scheduled for the next couple of months, for anyone who might be interested? (Or, okay, here’s a piece I wrote years ago about why creative writing workshops are or can be useful.)
For absolute beginners: Start Writing is a half-day Zoom on Saturday January 11th. It’s what we call a ‘generative’ workshop, which means it’s about getting stuff down on the page. It is interactive rather than a lecture - hence not recorded - and it’s low-pressure. Yes, everyone’s invited to participate, but this might mean chiming in with ‘yeah, I found that exercise worked well for me/was really tricky’ rather than sharing your actual writing (you learn from hearing comments on other people’s work as well as getting feedback on your own, after all).
For beginners & for people feeling a bit stuck: Creative Writing Boost is a 4-week Google Classroom course, weekly assignments with feedback designed to let you have (gasp) fun with writing again. I say ‘again’ because for many, many people, writing - or at least storytelling, inventing - used to be a playful, easy thing, and then something happened (school, college, work, publishing, not-publishing) to make it harder. And I’m not denying that trying to get better at something inevitably involves hard work - absolutely not - but this is an attempt to reclaim some of the sparks-of-joy, some of the playfulness.
For beginners & for people who want to focus on a particular form: Beginning To Write Fiction (starting 27th Jan) and Intro to Writing Children’s Fiction (starting 3rd Feb) are two 4-week courses that are designed to work for two sorts of writer equally, the ‘beginner but knows what they want to write’ type and the ‘not-beginner but would like a bit more specific advice on this thing’ variety.
For people trying to get their heads around book-length projects, & who are okay talking about it (not the plot, just how it’s going): Outlining Your Novel (Zoom, Sat 25th Jan) is the condensed version of everything I’ve learned from years of writing and from nearly 20 years of working with people specifically on novels and novel-length projects, and from witnessing the particular frustrations writers have when moving from short-form to long-form. Places are limited on this one so that we can trouble-shoot where everyone’s at with their project - as with the other Zoom sessions, it’s very interactive and will not be recorded.
For people who’ve completed a manuscript & are looking at submitting to agents & publishers: I’ll be running Novel Submission Prep again in February, which is a course I designed as a way of formalising general advice and synopsis/opening-pages critiques I was doing for people on a 1-to-1 basis. (It is much easier to provide notes on five or ten or twenty synopses within a week than it is to space them out. Your brain needs to get into that strange place.)
For people who’ve taken workshops before & are used to getting feedback on their work & have a specific project they want notes on: critique/mentoring info is here.
And that’s me done for now! (More online courses in the autumn/winter, I hope, but this is it for winter/spring ‘25.) If you’ve questions about any of these, and there’s something that isn’t clear from the course description or booking policy, do let me know. And for the rest of you, the usual blog/newsletter-ish nonsense will resume shortly.