Each weekly session explores a different topic and includes reading and writing exercises designed to help you develop a range of creative, practical and critical skills.
You’ll explore the conventions of the genre and learn how crime fiction writers use techniques to inject suspense into their writing and will work towards producing the first chapter of a novel. In each session, you’ll collaborate with a close-knit team of fellow writers to share ideas and feedback on each other’s work.
Session 1: Starting Points? – In this opening session, we’ll look at ideas behind successful beginnings, and the beginnings of coming up with a compelling idea for a crime story. We’ll explore why a good crime writer is a good crime reader, with practical techniques to harness your love of crime novels and thrillers in ways that will hook your own readers.
Live group webinar with the tutor.
Session 2: Sense of Place – In this session we’ll look at how to use detail and the different senses to make your descriptions of place both resonant and razor-sharp.
Session 3: Criminally Good Characters – A crime story needs someone responsible for the crime – and someone to solve it. In this session we’ll look at an array of types of crime fighter and try out practical ways to make characters memorable – whether they are people you want your reader root for, or individuals they’ll want to see behind bars.
Live group webinar with the tutor.
Session 4: Powerful Plotting – We’ll look at some of the practical secrets behind good plotting, plus ways to plan out from an original premise to a narrative that continues to grow, intrigue and keep your reader on their toes.
Session 5: Pace and Action – If plotting is about pulling the story together, action is about giving the narrative its punch. In this session we’ll look at different ways of adding excitement into your work, with practical exercises on writing action and other techniques to vary the pace in your fiction.
Live group webinar with the tutor.
Session 6: Establishing Authenticity – This session focuses on why research is so important for the crime and thriller writer, including where to go to find out about police procedure, forensics and firearms, interviewing techniques and how to retro-fit facts.
Live Q&A webinar with featured guest crime author.
Session 7: Drawing Together Threads – Two weeks of quiet writing time as you focus on your final assignment: taking the setting, character and techniques you have explored through the course, you’ll write a first chapter or prologue for your peers to respond to.
Final group webinar with your tutor during the last week of the course.