The Novel Writing Toolkit

A 12-week writing workshop to help you take your novel idea from seed to scene

So you want to write a novel.

Wonderful. Let’s talk.

In this workshop, we’ll explore this amazing and expansive form. We’ll start with the seed of an idea, and then watch our fictional worlds grow, traveling together through creating and deepening characters, building setting, and exploring all the possibilities of plot, dialogue and tension…. All the way to creating a summary and workshopping our first scenes. 

You’ll leave the workshop with a clear picture of what you’re making, some completed scenes, and a new, deeper understanding of the novel form. You’ll also have loads of tools to keep going through the full first draft and into revisions.

Here’s how it works:

We’ll begin with exploring where stories come from, and sketching out fresh ideas. From there, we’ll choose a few we want to work up, and we’ll build characters, setting and plot, using a variety of approaches, to see which idea we are most excited about. When we find “the one,” we’ll continue with that.

We believe strongly that there is no “right” way to write a novel. We will give you tools and inspiration to try out lots of different ways, so that you can see and feel what works best for your story.

There will be writing homework between each session, with optional extra readings for those of us who like to go down that ‘ol rabbit hole.