Find Your Voice (January 2025)
Explore the craft of creative writing by paying attention to voice. We will discover how to find and develop our voices as writers and what it means to have the confidence to speak, as ourselves, on the page.
With help from a diverse list of contemporary authors including Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Strout, Guy Gunarante, Claire-Louise Bennett, Owen Sheers, Yann Martel, Stephen King and Ocean Vuong, author and creative tutor Natalie Young invites you on a journey in search of your own identity as a writer, and will encourage you to shape that identity on the page. Find Your Voice has been designed to offer creative support and is suitable for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction.
All participants will be provided with a collaborative space in which to develop individual writing styles and book ideas, with the course therefore perfect for writers either in the embryonic stages of a writing journey, or for those with a completed draft but aware of the need to further interrogate their work and/or regain creative momentum.
Participants can expect to join a group with a maximum of 20 students, and no previous formal writing experience is required to sign up.
Across the six weeks, students will be encouraged to write as much as they can, both in the form of free-writing and also through structured writing tasks to be used as a starting point for further workshop discussion. Each evening session will run from 7-9pm, making it ideal for those with full-time jobs and other commitments.
Course Benefits
- 12 hours of advice from an experienced author and creative writing tutor
- Practical sessions with hands-on exercises designed for you to revolve around your ideas
- Guest speaker to be confirmed
- Course materials available to view ahead of each session, plus catch-up audio recordings
- Broad range of contemporary authors included in workshop discussions
- Your group will consist of a maximum of 20 students
- Exclusive opportunity of a follow-up one-to-one consultation with your course leader
- Discounts on W&A products including editing services and books
- A complimentary copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook 2025
Each week, sessions will combine tutorials with practical exercises, discussion and feedback.
Optional Extra: Bespoke Feedback. All course participants will have the exclusive opportunity to submit 1500 words (plus working synopsis/chapter outline) to their course leader ahead of a 30-minute one-to-one consultation. This is entirely optional and comes at an additional cost of £50, with details to be circulated ahead of Week 5.
Course Outline
Throughout the course students will be writing and submitting work, as well as reading other people's work and providing feedback.
WEEK 1: MAKING CLAY - In our first session we will discuss what we mean by voice. We will then have a series of fun and informal exercises towards what we call ‘making clay’ so that we have some initial material to work with. Our reading material will focus on the process of writing with a range of extracts to demonstrate a range of approaches and techniques
MEMORY, SENSES and VOICE - In the second half of our first session we will explore techniques for accessing and representing memories and senses, capturing fleeting impressions and character quirks and start to consider how these raw elements will contribute to your writing and characters.
WEEK 2: DIALOGUE and VOICE - How do we use dialogue to enhance and carry a piece of writing? What can we learn from a selection of examples about how best to write dialogue and when and where to use and not use it?
WEEK 3: YOUR VOICE and OTHER VOICES – Reading and slowly examining other voices is as important for your writing as actually sitting there and putting the words on the page. How does spending time with our favourite authors and tuning into their work allow us to piggy-back until we are ready to jump off and write? At what point do we need to stop reading others in order to focus on our work?
WEEK 4 and 5: SHAPING THE CLAY – Workshopping becomes more intense as each student brings in 1000 words for feedback by the group. This session follows a live demonstration of writing in real time with feedback response between the two course tutors with the idea that the writing discussed will be used as a springboard for a longer more considered piece to be presented in WEEK 6. Participants will then be reading out their work in the second part of this session and in the following week. This part of the course is designed to encourage a critical and professional distance between the writer and their work.
WEEK 6: WHAT’S THE STORY? In this concluding workshop participants receive more detailed feedback on work submitted to the discussion board in advance. We will discuss how voice and story combine to give the reader an emotional response to the work. Finding your voice is just the beginning. Turning your voice towards a story is the next step. A whistle stop tour of the fundamentals of storytelling will be included as well as suggestions for how to move your story forward.
You can download Teams free on your computer, or join via the web: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-teams/download-app
Prep
Ahead of the first session, you’re welcome to start taking a look at the texts on the reading list, which you can find here: https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/advice/find-your-voice-2024-reading-list-confirmed. The short stories are linked in the article so you’re welcome to make a start on reading them anytime, but there’s no obligation to make a start on any of this reading until the course starts and we will be providing the extracts of the longer works you’ll be focusing on as reading materials for each session. Although you’re welcome to read the books on the list if you want a wider picture of the works. Some are available free online or via BorrowBox so do check that out.
I’ll circulate a questionnaire via email that we’d appreciate you filling in and sending back to us ahead of the class. It’s just to give Natalie a bit more of a sense of where you are at, what projects you are working on etc so they can tailor the course to your needs.
Natalie has also asked that you bring pen/ pencil and paper to the session. She encourages you to write directly on paper if you can. Using old fashioned pencil/pen generates a different kind of rhythm and helps to loosen you up, relax into the flow of writing and get out beyond that pesky inner critic.
Slack
Finally, we will be using Slack during the course, which is a free, easy-to-use platform that enables everything related to the course to be stored in one place. Please click on the below link to gain access to the Slack workspace that we’ve created for this course:
https://join.slack.com/t/findyourvoice2025/shared_invite/zt-2xmbbkatt-lb7lPlx9Ruu_skTqkSkW~g
When you arrive in Slack you’ll see the workspace is called ‘Find Your Voice 25’, with several channels within that workspace. A quick bit of guidance on how these different channels will work:
- Course Etiquette: We’ve put together some course etiquette guidelines. Please have a read and comment to confirm that you’ve seen them.
- General: This is a general discussion board. Natalie, James and myself will all have access but it’s not something we’re going to get involved in. This is for you guys to chat amongst yourselves, discuss, share advice and book recommendations! A great way to start would be to introduce yourselves, share info about your writing journey so far and let the rest of the group know what you’re working on and why you’re here.
- Find Your Voice: We will be recording every class and will post the links to these recordings here, as well as details of the homework each week.
Finally, as part of your course fee you receive a complimentary copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook, which is full of advice articles, and agent and publisher listings. Please do send [email protected] your address when you can so we can get that in the post to you!
