Cheshire Novel Prize Summer School 2024
Summer School will help you to put your work in progress under the microscope and edit your novel with the support of weekly interactive live workshops, worksheets, an online private chat forum via an app, and recordings sent afterwards for you to keep.
The weekly 2 hour live workshops will allow entrants to ask questions and reflect on previous sessions. In addition to the 6 live workshops, we will also host one live event (details to be confirmed), and one live agent event at the end of the course. These events are exclusive to summer school attendees only.
Summer School runs from September through October 2023 and is taught during Thursday evenings at 7pm or Saturday afternoons at 2pm. Summer School is run by our founder Sara Naidine Cox and is suitable for writers of any genre. You can still enter Cheshire Novel Prize or Cheshire Novel Prize Kids if you attend summer school as Sara does not read or judge entries for the competitions.
This online course via Zoom, will cover:
Week Zero – Introductions/Ice Breaker
This Zoom call will introduce all delegates on the course to each other, set objectives and goals and understand how the course works. This is also a good time for questions regarding the course. We will also have guest speaker talking about editing processes.
Week One – Plot, Story & Structure
Have you started your novel in the right place? Have you dropped your reader right into the action? Is your story strong enough to sustain 80,000 + words? Does each chapter earn its place with the right amount of dramatic structure?
Week Two – Characterisation
Are your characters worth investing in? Will your readers care about them? Do they have agency? In this session we will do a deep dive into characterisation. Is your dialogue authentic?
Week Three Voice & Point of View
Is your POV close enough? Have you chosen the right tense, POV? Have you created an authentic engaging narrative voice? This session will look at how to get this right.
Week Four – Narrative & Prose
This final week will look at how you structure your sentences. Do you have a varied rhythm of sentences for depth and texture? Are you using too many adverbs or filler words or filter words or relying on dialogue tags? In this session, we put your narrative under the microscope and learn how to make your book the best it can be.
Course includes:
Live workshops & recordings
Worksheets
Free private chat group for all attendees via an app.
One private live author event on Zoom with published authors taking about their editing process (dates TBC)
One private live agent event talking about submissions and giving you handy hints and tips for polishing your draft (dates TBC).
Timings:
Course A: Saturdays 2pm-4pm UK time- September-October 2024. Dates TBC
Agent and author event dates TBC
Course B: Thursdays 7-9 pm UK time-September -October 2024. Dates TBC
*Please note. These days are not interchangeable. You must pick either Saturday or Thursday. However, if you need to swap a Thursday to a Saturday you may do so by emailing us at entry@cheshirenovelprize.com before the weekly class begins. However we recommend where possible to remain in your groups so that you can complete the homework and BETA read each others work.
Price £149.99 per person.
Registration will open on 1st May 2024