Creative Writing Courses

How do I pick the creative writing course that’s right for me?

If you’re at a beginner level, or it’s been a while since you’ve written anything, we’d advise you to start with a shorter, cheaper, less demanding course. If you’re more experienced, then do feel free to dive in at the top end. If in doubt, get in touch with our Writer Support team. They’re there to help you make the right choice.

How do online writing courses work?

Easily! We offer a mixture of written and video tutorials, and live webinars if you’re participating in one of our tutored creative writing courses. Most of our courses ask you to perform some kind of homework task, for you to upload each week for feedback from either your fellow students or your course tutor. With our tutored courses, you’ll get regular, direct feedback from your tutor.

What will I get from a creative writing course?

Our online video courses will give you some basic tools for structuring and analysing your work. But also, we hope that these video courses will unlock your own creativity and inspire you to take your creative writing more seriously.

With our more advanced courses, you will probably already have written part or all of a manuscript. You’ll be familiar with the basic elements of craft (plotting, character development, prose style, etc). You’ll be ready for a deeper dive into those topics and more relentless analysis of your work. Your own writing skills will certainly improve, but we would expect your manuscript to emerge from the process much stronger as well.

And please note that our courses focus on creative writing – novels, short stories, children’s fiction, and creative non-fiction. If your writing interests are more technical (eg: academic writing), our courses are probably not right for you.

I’m not in the UK. Can I still take one of your courses?

Of course. We have a highly international client base and very much welcome the diversity of voices across all of our writing courses.

Are your courses well-suited to those who don’t have English as a first language?

Possibly not. Our courses are focused on creative writing, not language study. If you want to improve your written or spoken English, we recommend a course chosen for that exact purpose (it’s not something we do.) But if your English is already strong, you should have no difficulty getting a lot from our courses.

Do I need to be technically savvy to take one of your online courses?

Not really. If you’re reasonably comfortable with the Internet, and using tools such as Facebook, you’ll have no difficulty. If you are a little older and nervous of the online environment, you may want to talk to us before signing up.

Do people really get published as a result of taking your writing courses?

No. They get published as a result of writing a really excellent manuscript – which we may have helped with a little along the way. For what it’s worth, around one third of our Ultimate Novel Writing students last year secured full manuscript requests from literary agents, and many students from across our courses have gone on to be published or successfully self-publish their books.

Do I get feedback from a tutor or my fellow students?

With our tutored courses, you will always get feedback from a tutor, but our workshop environment is supportive, collaborative, and focused. That means you’ll also be getting constructive feedback from your fellow students – and offering your thoughts as well.

With our online video-led courses, you can choose between purely self-paced courses, that don’t require homework, and peer-to-peer courses where you’ll be getting feedback from other students, and learning to give it too.

I’m interested in your Ultimate Novel Course. Is that the equivalent of a Masters Degree in Creative Writing?

Well, yes and no. Our courses don’t confer any kind of academic qualification. However, the Ultimate Novel Writing Course is for people who are very serious about getting their work written to the highest possible standard and, ideally, published. Publishers just don’t mind whether someone has a Masters or not. They care whether a manuscript is strong enough to sell commercially.

We’ve designed our Ultimate Novel Writing course to give you a greater depth of mentoring than you find on typical Masters courses, and we are also much more open to genre fiction. (We still love literary fiction too, of course.) We’re serious about the study of plot and structure, but we are also serious about giving you the tools and industry connections needed to get published or self-publish your work successfully. Again, these are areas where many or even most Masters degrees are lacking.