Writing a Literary Novel Workshop
Course Information
Where: Online
Date: 30 April 2025
Duration: 8 months
Skill level: Advanced
Frequency: Monthly
Sessions: 8
Price: £3,750
Payment plans available
A Novel and Writer Transformation Programme
This immersive, deep-dive course values serious play as the engine of art, and allows space for experimentation and innovation as you progress a novel under the guidance of leading novelist and creative educator, Sarah Moss.
Over eight months, challenge expectations, rethink approaches and get to know your writing process from the inside out. You’ll learn to ask the right questions to move your novel forward, so your tutor can focus on what you really need to know to refine and recalibrate your work.
There is space for freedom and wildness in this course, as we encourage taking creative risks within a structure that still leads to measurable progress. You will work alongside a small group of fellow writers, and learn how peer exchange sits at the heart of developing your writerly intelligence. Experience a gradual process of iterative transformation in your ideas and voice, as you develop a more bold and confident practice as a novelist.
There will be eight monthly sessions divided into four weekly parts, running as follows:
- Week 1 - ‘creative playground’ activities to stimulate creativity, challenge habits, build writing muscles and inject fun into the process. After completing short practical writing tasks, share thoughts on what you discovered about yourself as a writer and what you can take into your novel. The tutor reflects on your discoveries and breakthroughs.
- Weeks 2 and 3 - focused writing-development time to progress your novel. You could produce new work or build on ideas developed through the playground week – for example you might rework the start of your novel based on a new voice you discovered in the play. Share 2-6,000 words from your novel each month for peer review. We’ll also learn from a short experimental novel each month.
- Week 4 - close-reading week. Read extracts of your peers’ developing novels and offer responses. The aim is to hone your self-editing skills and reflect on your work-in-progress. This reading is at least as important to the writerly development of the reader as the writer.
You’ll be given a free one-year digital subscription to Granta magazine, as well as access to curated extracts from Granta’s award-winning books, and the magazine, podcast and video archive. Throughout the course there is regular, monthly insight from Sarah Moss, guest authors and Granta staff through live and pre-recorded Zoom calls.
You’ll finish the course with at least 20-30,000 words of your novel, greater proficiency and confidence in yourself as a writer and editor, plus a new approach to your writing practice that makes you a more self-reliant and original novelist with finishing power beyond this project.
Entry is by application to ensure you get the most out of the course.
Course completion opens up our Alumni Space, which provides ongoing access to industry professionals, including authors, Granta editors and literary agents.
Course Syllabus
Explore the power of play and metaphor in novel-writing, and find out how collaboration and close-reading can transfigure your creative practice. Leave the session with increased awareness of your current writing process and possible new approaches.
Chart your starting and likely end points for this novel, and play around with time. Challenge what you think you know about the novel you are writing. Produce a map for your novel, reflect on your approach to time, and gain necessary distance from your writing. Meet with Sarah Moss for a one-on-one tutorial.
Reassess your approach to realism and your take on reader-expectations. Develop greater awareness of your relationship with your reader. From this month onwards, we will take apart a bold contemporary novel as we examine the session topics. This session focuses on Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn.
Experiment with new ways to depict people in your novel, thinking about psychology, action, viewpoints and retrospection. How do you create genuine, true-to-life characters that feel emotionally resonant? We will read and learn from Weather by Jenny Offill.
Looking back, looking forward. Many projects slow in the middle. It can be exciting to recognise the moment of change at this point as well as the importance of perseverance in long-form prose. For this and future projects, how can you learn to distinguish a rough patch from an impassable bog, and what is the compassionate and constructive response to each? Meet with Sarah Moss for a one-on-one tutorial, reflect on your progress, and learn from Spent Light by Lara Pawson.
Become more clear-thinking in the way you use tension and pace in your novel, and play with their effect on your reader. We will look at balancing tension, pace and patience, and read and reflect on We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Attend a group Zoom call with a guest author.
How can we innovate endings as novelists, and how can we reach beyond archetypes for meaning, aiming instead for wildness and freedom? We will focus on the endings of all our chosen novels. There will be a group Zoom call with a Granta editor.
What makes a confident writer and self-editor? How does prose become ‘exquisite’? Discover editing without hurting, and ways to maintain momentum with your novel after the course ends. Meet with Sarah Moss for a final one-on-one tutorial, and participate in a group Zoom call with a guest literary agent.
This course requires 10-12 hours per week. Find out more about the course and teaching method from our education partners Professional Writing Academy.
Sarah Moss | Course Director
Sarah has designed and taught literature and writing programmes for twenty years. As Director of the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick, she led a curriculum centred on experiment, serious play and creative failure, which are the roots of her own writing practice. As co-ordinator of the MA and MFA programmes in Creative Writing at UCD, she has developed an approach to creative pedagogy more interested in practice than product, teaching students to make art and literature in and of their own times and places before counting words and second-guessing a marketplace. She reviews contemporary fiction for publications including The Guardian, the New York Times, the Irish Times and the Times Literary Supplement.
Sarah is the author of eight novels, two memoirs, numerous essays, and academic work on Romanticism, travel, food and gender. Her work has been listed for prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Wellcome Prize. Summerwater was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and is being filmed for broadcast on Channel 4 in 2025. She has a BA, MSt. and doctorate from the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.