Cheshire Novel Prize Summer School - Revisit, Edit,Review Your Work In Progress. Dates for 2025 will be released early 2025
This 6-week online course run by our founder and editor, Sara Naidine Cox, 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. In addition to the 6 live workshops, we will also host two live events (details to be confirmed), one author event and one agent event. These are exclusive to summer school attendees, which gives you chance to ask questions. Summer School is taught during Thursday evenings at 7pm or Saturday afternoons at 2pm UK time.
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:
1. Live workshops & recordings
2. Worksheets
3. Free private chat group for all attendees via an app.
4. Two private live author events on Zoom with published authors taking about their editing process (dates TBC)
5. One private live agent event talking about submisisons and giving you handy hints and tips for polishing your draft (dates TBC).
Timings:
Course A: Thursdays 7pm-9pm UK time via Zoom.
Course B:
Saturday 2pm-4pm UK time via Zoom:
*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 before the weekly class begins. However we recommend where possible to remain in your groups so that you can complete the homework.
We don’t ask you to BETA read each others’ work. We believe the quality of the feedback can be variable based on individual knowledge, plus it is time consuming. However if you want to comment on each other’s homework tasks you can do so through our private chat forum. That way you are all feeding back with the same knowledge base and for the six weeks you are only focussed on your novel’s progress. There is also a Q&A session after each session where Sara will answer questions.
Price £199.00 per person.
Cancellation policy. As per our terms and conditions, if you wish to cancel the course you must email us at least one calendar month before the course start date to request a full refund. However, due to card platform fees and admin fees we cannot issue a full refund for cancellations for less than a month before teh course starts. Therefore, in these instances, a refund minus our platform costs and admin fees is refundable and shall be solely at our discretion(except under the cancellation terms of the Consumer Contracts Regulations of 13 June 2014).