Fiction Workshop with Dr Naomi Wood and Prof Andrew Cowan

Hone your craft, receive feedback, explore new techniques to use in your novels and short stories with two expert writers and teachers.
About this Event

Welcome to our Fiction Writing Workshop!

Date: every Wednesday evening from 26 Feb 2025-2 Apr 2025

Time: 19:00-21:00 GMT

Description: Join us over six weeks as we workshop your texts and explore various themes, subjects and challenges in fiction. For the first hour you will study an area of writing that will develop your writing skills and enhance your awareness of techniques used in fiction. In the second hour you will have your work (up to 3K) workshopped by your class and by your tutor. Each writer will be assigned one slot of 30 minutes and you will receive written and oral feedback in a supportive virtual environment. This class is limited to twelve people. Suitable for writers at all levels. Classes will be recorded and slides shared.

Schedule:

Week 1 - 26 Feb: Characterisation and the Sacred Flaw

Week 2 - 5 Mar: Relationships and Desire

Week 3 - 12 Mar: The Complex Past, the Open Future

Week 4 - 19 Mar: The Possibilities of Style

Week 5 - 26 Mar: Structuring Scenes: Beats, Escalation, Causation

Week 6 - 2 Apr: What we Talk about when We Talk about Dialogue

Your Tutors:

Dr Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Godless Boys, Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game. As a novelist, her books have won a Jerwood Award, the British Library Hay Festival Prize, and been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Historical Writers Golden Crown. Her début story collection This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things was published in 2024 . In 2023 she won the BBC National Short Story Prize. She teaches Creative Writing at UEA.

Professor Andrew Cowan was for ten years the Director of the Creative Writing programme at UEA, where he taught for twenty years on the MA in Creative Writing. He is the author of the bestselling guidebook, The Art of Writing Fiction, recently reissued in an updated second edition. His first novel Pig was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for five other awards. He has since published five other novels: Common Ground, Crustaceans, What I Know, Worthless Men and, most recently,Your Fault.