Novel Studio Showcase 2020

July 21, 2020 / Emily / 0 Comments

Readers and guests from The Novel Studio Showcase

Harriet Tyce introducing the night

Last Wednesday the Novel Studio showcase took place on Zoom for the very first time. And what a night it was. Hosted brilliantly by tutor Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, with an introduction by Novel Studio alumna and scholarship sponsor, Harriet Tyce, the event was attended by over 100 guests.

With 12 students reading 4 minute extracts from their novels-in-progress it was a chance for friends, family and industry attendees to hear the astonishing talent on display, and owing to Zoom’s chat facility, feedback was instantaneous and uniformly glowing. Any fears over a lack of atmosphere online were soon dispelled by the unexpected intimacy afforded by hearing the work on Zoom. As one observer commented, ‘It was like being read to in your own room.” A resounding success, one agent said it was her ‘favourite Zoom event by far this year.”

Thank you to the students, our tutors, all our guests and to our fantastic short course team who helped make the night possible.

For those who didn’t get a chance to be there on the night, the whole evening is available to view again here.

Congratulations class of 2020!!

For more information about the Novel Studio visit our course page here.

City Writes Takes to Zoom with Magical Effect

By Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

What a delight to be able to share our fabulous City Writes competition winners alongside alumna, author, screenwriter and folklorist Shahrukh Husain, with a Zoom audience on Wednesday the 8th July 2020. After delaying the Spring event due to the pandemic, it was brilliant to be back online.

Competition winners, Alexandra McDermott, Marina Nenadic, Mike Clarke, AS Renard and Linda Fripps all shared their stories, taking us from Kansas, to a fish market in Gothenburg, then to a comedy club in Hackney, a horse ride through Mexico and finally to a treatment room in a Children’s A&E department. The authors all read brilliantly. Something about Zoom really lends an intimacy to readings that creates a plus side to missing out on seeing people in the flesh. It’s great to be spellbound by voices that transport us with their stories.

Following the readings, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Shahrukh Husain. A former student on the Certificate in Novel Writing (the Novel Studio as was), Shahrukh is an incredibly experienced and talented writer with a love and enthusiasm for storytelling that is infectious. Focused around the recent republication of The Virago Book of Witches, which she edited and wrote a new forward for, our conversation explored the witch across cultures and through history.

For those of you wanting a more in-depth experience, a video of the event is available to watch here. I thoroughly recommend it. The readings and conversation were inspiring. I left wanting to get reading and writing as well as feeling filled with enthusiasm for next term’s City Writes (also to be held on Zoom) that will host the wonderful Deepa Anappara, whose novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was longlisted for the Booker Prize earlier this year. Watch this space for announcements of competition deadlines and event dates.

Top Ten Tips for Writing Crime Fiction

June 16, 2020 / Josie Gleave / 0 Comments

By Caroline Green

Crime fiction is booming right now. If you have ever wondered if you could write for this thriving, thrilling genre, here are ten things you should know:

Understand who you are writing for. Read widely within the genre and decide what type of crime fiction you love to read. (Frankly, if you don’t get excited about reading it, why do you want to write it?)
But after you’ve read all those lovely books, don’t try and second guess the market. No one saw the likes of Girl On The Train. The most important thing is to know the genre but write what you want to write.
Watch quality drama as well as reading books. Programmes such as Happy Valley or Line of Duty can teach budding crime writers a lot, despite being delivered via a different medium.
Aim for living, breathing, characters, not cardboard cut-outs. If you are writing another alcoholic PI or police investigator make sure they are so well-rounded they could step right off the page. What is their back story? What made them who they are?
Don’t be afraid to delve into your dark side. Your own imagination is more powerful – and has more twists – than all the CGI in the world. Tap into it and never shy away from those big, bold ideas that make you think, ‘Dare I…?’.
The best twists don’t come hurtling out of nowhere. The really satisfying ones make such perfect sense, you can’t believe you didn’t see them coming.
Remember that conflict is the engine of story-telling. Try to weave some form of conflict into every single scene, every conversation, every plot line.
Think about the ‘why-dunnit’ and not just the ‘who’. The reason psychological thrillers have taken off so much – and helped cause that boom in sales – is that the psychology behind dark deeds makes for a gripping read.
Vary your pace. Sometimes readers need space to breathe, and others they need to be sent hurtling towards the thrilling climax of your story.
Let your setting do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to creating atmosphere. A creepy atmospheric setting can really help rachet up tension.

Caroline Green writes best-selling thrillers as Cass Green and teaches our Crime Writing Summer School. Enrol now for a week’s course delivered online, starting 20^th July.

Our Turn to Learn: How Short Courses Adapted to Covid-19

May 29, 2020 / Josie Gleave / 0 Comments

In week eight of the short courses spring term the country was hurled into lockdown and all classroom teaching was formally suspended.

News of these much-needed safety measures was welcomed by the Short Course team; but with two more weeks of teaching to go and a new term around the corner, the pressure was on.

Having seen the situation unfold in the weeks prior, we’d already started planning for remote learning; but it was safe to say the global pandemic had thrown us in at the deep end.

Now that safety had been addressed, our first concern was completing the spring term so that current students could finish the courses they had been working so hard for.

Led by Bill Richardson, our team catch-up meetings were upped to twice a week, to talk through issues arising and ensure our students got the quality teaching that they deserve.

All students were notified that the final two lessons of spring term would be taught remotely and were provided with clear instructions for using the online learning tools, Moodle and Microsoft Teams. Course Coordinators worked closely with our tutors to offer training and technical support for running online classes.

Next we had to consider our approach to the summer term, due to start in a matter of weeks. We had to make a choice – postpone teaching or embrace the challenge. Encouraged by positive feedback from the spring term and a desire to fulfil our commitment to students, we decided to make it work.

Our marketing creative required a total overhaul to focus on remote learning. We communicated our new offering via emails, blogs and the City website. This was not without its complications. Our online message to students coincided with a University-wide content freeze of the City website, delaying our plans. We pushed term back by one week to give us more time to prepare.

Grappling with issues of student IT logins, joining instructions and training for online platforms, there was a lot of work to be done. Forward thinking from the Short Courses Administration team meant that students were contacted to talk through any technical difficulties before the start of term. Computing courses presented their own set of challenges of software setup and configuration. Our Computing Coordinator offered step-by step guidance and live email and phone support.

The first week of term went smoothly – largely due to the dedication and hard work from the team. We had 474 students confirmed on over 50 short courses. A welcomed consequence of these unexpected events was collaboration within the team – and beyond it. From Course Coordinators leaning on one-another to navigate through set up and planning; to Research & Enterprise’s Stefan Rankov, who particularly went out of his way to offer training support on Microsoft Teams.

Now into our fourth week of the summer term, we are undergoing a careful evaluation process, requesting feedback from students and tutors to identify any problems and adapt our approach accordingly. We have some tweaks to make but so far, our response has been overwhelmingly positive from tutors and students alike.

“I had a great time learning C with you. Specific thanks for putting together the virtual class, I found this super helpful and think I actually preferred the format.”

Benjamin Wade, C++ student

“The short courses team expeditiously responded to my training needs and were able to provide close guidance and support on adapting my classes to enable online seminars, chats, calls, screensharing, and file sharing, so that I could seamlessly move into virtual teaching.”

Nasreen Chaudhury, Law tutor

None of this would have been possible without our tutors’ admirable approach to change, their enthusiasm to teach and their wiliness to get to grips with online learning techniques. Even more wonderful is the willingness from tutors to share their best practice techniques and teaching experiences with one another.

Thank you to all of our staff and tutors for making our move to online teaching such a success.

How has your experience been of learning online with us? We’d love to hear, write your comments in the section below.

Shahrukh Husain

City Writes Returns on Zoom!

May 26, 2020 / Emily / 0 Comments

By Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

We’re delighted to announce that last term’s postponed City Writes event with the fabulous Shahrukh Husain will now be running virtually on Wednesday 8th July 6.45-8pm through Zoom.

With a brilliant set of competition winners raring to share their work, we will not only be hearing from Shahrukh Husain whose stellar career includes screenplays, plays, fiction and non-fiction, we will also be listening to stories from Novel Studio alumnus Mike Clarke, current Novel Studio students Linda Fripps and Alexandra McDermott, and short course alumni Marina Nenadic and A S Renard.

: Mike Clarke

: Marina Nenadic

: Linda Fripps

: AS Renard

: Alexandra McDermott

Come on a journey with us as we breakdown in Kansas, horse ride across Mexico, reminisce about our Swedish grandmother, try out stand up in Hackney and contemplate the mindset of a woman who smacks her child. Different places, different emotions, in our current climate this is where you need to be on the 8th July.

After we hear the competition winners’ stories, we’ll be talking to Shahrukh Husain about the ongoing relevance of witches, myth and the fairytale in general as we celebrate the reissue of Virago’s The Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh.

This event will be free to attend. But you do need to register for the event in advance.

Please use this link to register.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Novel Studio Literary Agent Competition 2020

May 18, 2020 / Emily / 0 Comments

Calling all applicants to the Novel Studio 2020!

In a rare opportunity to bypass the slush pile, all applications to the Novel Studio will automatically be considered for our literary agent competition, run in conjunction with Christine Green Authors’ Agency.

The Novel Studio is City’s flagship year-long course for aspiring novelists. Established for over a decade, the course has a formidable track record of published alumni including bestselling crime author Harriet Tyce and debut novelist Deepa Anappara.

Previous winners of the competition include Hannah Begbie, award-winning author of Mother, and the hotly anticipated, Blurred Lines; and Louise Beere, shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2019.

The deadline for applications is 30 June 2020.

For full details on criteria and how to apply, visit our competition page.

We look forward to reading your entries!

Novel Studio alumna Ali Thurm publishes debut novel

May 4, 2020 / Emily / 0 Comments

Novel Studio alumna Ali Thurm on the enduring group of friends she made while on the course, and her path to publication.

“In 2012 I’d been working on One Scheme of Happiness for about a year; I could tell a story with a beginning, middle and end but what I had wasn’t a novel. I’ve always read a lot and studied literature at university so I knew what a novel could be like. I knew I could write but I didn’t know how to structure a novel, how to write effective dialogue and many things I didn’t even know I didn’t know (voice, point of view, first person or third person…)

Then I saw an open evening for the Novel Studio (arts council website). By the end of the course I not only had a structure I was happy with, I also knew how to write a letter to an agent and how to submit my work. I also had a group of friends who would give valuable, objective feedback on my work. Seven years later we still meet regularly to write, share work and celebrate successes. Even in this time of self-isolation we’re Zooming together. It’s been amazing to be friends with other writers who are also balancing writing with work and childcare.

After the course I kept going until I had a draft of my novel that I was happy with, then started:

Choosing agents and sending the first few chapters out.
Enrolling on short courses.
Entering novel competitions.
Building up an author profile on Twitter.

It’s a lot of work and a lot of rejection and costs money (some courses and competitions have subsidised places).

But it all helps, and in 2015 I was taken on by Emily Sweet Associates; it was wonderful for a professional to ‘get’ my novel and to validate my writing. Emily suggested editing and redrafting – more work – but the new draft led to some long and short-listing in national competitions. To minimise the angst of waiting for more rejection from publishers (easier if your agent can soften the blow!) I drafted a new novel and set up a WordPress blog to review new books. I also signed up to NetGalley – a brilliant way of reading new books as digital ‘galley proofs’ before they’re published. For free. All you have to do is write a review after you’ve read them. I’ve read books by Kamila Shamsie, Linda Grant, Kit de Waal and many more. Reading is vital for any writer.

Finally in 2018 an indie publisher, Retreat West Books, wanted to publish my novel. Again I had more work to do on the novel itself as well as promoting it on social media, but Amanda Saint has been a great editor. On 27 Feb 2020 my debut, One Scheme of Happiness was published. Just before lock down, I had a launch and signed copies of my book like a proper author!

I’m now working on my next novel: The River Brings the Sea (third in the First Novel Award, 2019).“

Congratulations, Ali!

You can follow her on Twitter @alithurm

Or her blog on WordPress https://alithurm.com

For anyone interested in The Novel Studio, applications are now open for entry in October 2020. Further details here.

Distant Learning: How to Pick an Online Course

April 29, 2020 / Josie Gleave / 0 Comments

Covid-19 has changed adult education overnight. With all classroom learning postponed until further notice, many of us are seeking out alternatives ways to upskill or pursue a new interest. And there is certainly no shortage of choice!

The internet is oversaturated with distant learning providers, from prerecorded lectures to technology led learning, it’s hard to know where to begin. So to help you, we’ve got some top tips for finding an online course.

Top 3 tips for picking an online course

Find a reputable provider

With so many options online, is can be hard to identity reputable providers from a host of low-quality distant learning courses. Do your research. Be cautious of unknown providers or courses offered at exceptionally low cost – if it seems too good to be true, it may well be.

Be mindful of group sizes

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are free online courses open to anyone across the world. While this may seem like an attractive offer, it is a learning experience that will not suit everyone. You’ll be one of tens of thousands of students taking a course, meaning there won’t be opportunities to have one-to-one meetings and direct feedback from the tutor. If you want a tutor-led experience, where the tutor will be mindful of whether you are doing well or you need extra support a MOOC is not the answer.

Look for courses with live tutor engagement

The term distant learning can mean many different things. To really get the most out of your time, look for a course that provides live, two-way interaction between you and your tutor. Not only can building a rapport with your tutor and peers improve your performance, it also makes a much more personable and enjoyable learning experience.

Short Courses at City, University of London

City, University of London has already started teaching short courses remotely. We hope that you’ll learn with us and enjoy the benefits we have on offer. If you’re still not sure, here are some reasons to study online with City.

Quality education from a world-leading University

City, University of London is one of the most trusted names in adult education, with a longstanding reputation for excellence across all our short course provision. As part of the prestigious University of London Federation, we offer industry-led education at a world-class University.

Learn as part of small group

Traditionally a face-to-face provider, City Short Courses can bring the benefits of classroom learning to your home. You will learn as part of a small group, with no more than 20 other students – but usually less than ten and often just four or five others – creating a personable and tailored learning experience.

“It’s great to be able to participate in classes from the comfort of your own home and it helps to have a small class size, so we get lots of time to talk about our work and get feedback from the tutor.”

Hamdi Khalif, The Novel Studio student

Quality time and feedback from your tutor

Due to our small group-size, you’ll be guaranteed a high level of interaction with your tutor. Our tutors will be available to you live throughout the class, giving you ample opportunity to ask questions and work at a pace that suits you.

“Each group and class I teach is completely unique. There is no ‘one size fits all’ in my classes, they are very much led by the individual students’ interests or areas of concern. The students get so much more out of the lessons when learning is directed by the students’ needs”.

Dionisios Dimakopoulos, Tutor and Computing Course Coordinator

Next term starts Monday 4^th May 2020, find out more about our courses and enrol online.

COVID-19 UPDATE

March 31, 2020 / Josie Gleave / 0 Comments

To ensure the safety of our students and teaching staff, we are delivering courses remotely until further notice. Live tutor support and virtual lessons will take place during advertised teaching hours.

Writing Deadlines

February 26, 2020 / Emily / 0 Comments

Two deadlines are fast approaching for all you brilliant writers out there.

City Writes: Deadline for submissions 6^th March

This term’s Cit y Writes, an event showcasing the best writing from City’s Creative Writing Short Courses, will feature the fabulous Shahrukh Husain. Editor of The Book of Witches, as well as screenwriter, playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer, Shahrukh will be sharing this wonderful collection and exploring the ongoing relevance of myth and fairytale.

shahrukh husain

For your chance to share the stage with Shahrukh, enter your best 1,000 words of fiction or creative non-fiction by midnight Friday 6th March. You can find all the submission details here.

The event will take place on Wednesday April 1st in City’s 125 Suite at 6.30pm and you can buy tickets to hear Shahrukh and the competition winners here. Details of the competition winners will be announced in week 9.

Already excited? Prepare for the event by reading Emily Pedder’s interview with Shahrukh Husain here.

Ruppin Agency Full Mentoring & Editing Scheme: Deadline 9^th March

If you’ve made good progress with your book, fiction or non-fiction, and are looking for a breakthrough that will make your writing stand out to agents and publishers, apply for the Ruppin Agency’s Full Mentoring & Editing scheme.

The scheme consists of six monthly sessions with a mentor and a full developmental edit by The Book Edit.

An additional session with a literary agent will give you some invaluable DOS and DON’TS specific to your book.

You can choose from their team of over 30 mentors, all published writers and experienced creative writing teachers, based across the UK, meeting up in person or via videocall. For more information contact: studio@ruppinagency.com.