Curtis Brown Creative

The Creative Brown Creative crew, Singapore Writer's Festival 2013

I just completed a three day novel writing course with fifteen of the most inspiring and creative people I have ever met. Here we are all are at the end of the course looking incredibly inspired and somewhat intellectually drained. After such an intense three days, it was sad to say goodbye but happily, we all swapped emails and already have a facebook page where we intend to share our writerly news and hopefully, establish some critiquing relationships.

Anna Davis and Jake Arnott

The course was run by Curtis Brown Creative as part of the Singapore Writer's Festival. It was tutored by  Anna Davis and Jake Arnott, so we knew we were in good hands.

Anna is an agent for Curtis Brown UK as well as director of Curtis Brown Creative. She is also the author of 5 novels which have been published around the world in over twenty languages.

Jake is the author of six best selling novels, two of which have been serialized for British television.

The course itself, Writing Your Novel - From Beginning to End and Beyond, was certainly everything it promised to be. We discussed beginnings, character, point of view, story, plot, editing, rewriting, endings, letters to agents and how to get published. We also did plenty of writing exercises focussing on our own work and got a personal twenty minute critique of our manuscripts from both Anna and Jake. Invaluable stuff!

Personally, I got a great deal from the course. Not only did I have several epiphanies about how to improve my story, but I also enjoyed listening to the enormous diversity of stories taking shape amongst the participants. We had crime thrillers, historical fiction, autobiographical, dystopian, photographic and detective novels as well as my children's story and more. It was a delight and an honour to get a glimpse into the creative process of this amazing group of people.

I also enjoyed getting out of my pyjamas and leaving the school run, dinner and dishwasher hum drum to my ever supportive husband for several days :-)

Curtis Brown Creative have a new online novel writing course available. Applications open soon and the next course starts February 2014.