I’m currently enrolled onto the Faber Academy Kickstart Your Novel course with Caroline Smailes. I always find courses a good idea – by no means are they necessary in your writing journey (and let’s be honest – they are pretty expensive!), but for me they provide extra motivation to write in the form of accountability. There are deadlines each week and specific tasks which motivates me to get writing done – almost as it’s a homework task. Without this impetus, it’s easier to just spend my time watching another episode of Bones or endlessly scrolling through instagram.
I believe the course is fairly new, and was created as a bridge between their “Getting Started: Beginner’s Fiction” course and their 6-month Writing a Novel course. I took the former in October 2019, vowing to actually write a book once it was over. Clearly that did not happen. I did enjoy the course but found it focused more on general writing concepts and exercises about a myriad of different topics. The Kickstart Your Novel course seemed more appealing as the end-result is an opening of a novel, and so (hopefully and from the course outline), the exercises will be more focused on progressing a singular idea or novel. Faber also state that the course is good preparation for their 6 month course, which I do hope to apply to after this course ends.
I’m currently on the first week of the course, and we just had our introductory zoom with the tutor. The exercises this week are all over why we choose to write and where we get our ideas from. Luckily I’ve always found it fairly easy to come up with an initial idea – it’s turning initial ideas into something with substance and structure that I struggle with.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the course. Here’s hoping I finish the 8 weeks with a better outline for my novel and make a succesful application to the 6 month course which starts in January.
Rhi writes a book 