Hand-in-hand to great writing in 2018

Posted December 1, 2017

In Creative Writing Courses, Newsletters

There’s a paradox to writing: it is at once an intensely solitary activity, and at the same time is dependent on the good opinion of a vast community of readers.

And while, necessarily, writers must wrestle to spell out their stories alone, with nothing to comfort them but, perhaps, a bottle of good red wine at their elbows, it helps enormously to have support and encouragement from a much smaller community of trusted advisors and readers.

This is where All About Writing, and our community, joins individual writers on their journeys.

And this is why we have great pleasure in unveiling our rollout of writing courses for 2018. Each of them presents writers with the opportunity to join hands with us, and their fellow writers, in polishing their craft, or dipping their toes in the shallows of fiction (or fact), or in constructing a story that’s long been on their minds.

This is the age of the internet, so most of our courses are available anywhere in the world. Our 2018 face-to-face programmes include offerings in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Venice, Stow-on-the-Wold, on (or very nearby) Richard and Trish’s narrowboat Patience on a waterway in England, and in a bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland’s national booktown.

Our courses range from our dynamic new Day-by-Day coaching programme which we’ll launch in January, and repeat three more times over the year… to the seven-day writing retreat in a palazzo in Venice in September.

We teach the complete range of writing skills on our flagship Creative Writing Course, give an introduction to creative writing on our online Power of Writing course, and steer writers through the stormy waters of sex on our online Guide to Writing Sex Scenes. You’ll also find courses dedicated to writing screenplays, romance and journalism.

So, if you’re tempted by these suggestions, click here for the complete showcase of writing programmes available from All About Writing in 2018.

Win a place on our Day-by-Day coaching programme

All About Writing’s writing challenge for November and December offers our most generous prize yet: a place on our brand-new online course, the Creative Writing Day-by-Day coaching programme, worth R2250, which provides two weeks of writing advice, coupled with full personal feedback and coaching every day.

Here’s the writing challenge:

No free lunch

Your character has just received or achieved something they have wanted badly for a long time. Write the scene in which they discover their triumph is not as clear-cut and unalloyed as they first thought. There’s a catch.

Your scene should be no more than 300 words long. Paste your entry into the body of an email and send it to trish@allaboutwritingcourses.com. Deadline midnight 15 December 2017.