Overview

We’ve designed this online course to provide an experience that’s as close to our successful London-based courses as we can make it. You’ll receive direct engagement with industry professionals, including a one-to-one tutorial at course end with either an agent from Curtis Brown or C&W, or a CBC editor with substantial publishing experience, based on 6,000 words from your work-in-progress. This is a course for people who are serious about writing a novel. As well as being packed with useful content, it’s flexible so you can write and study at times to suit you.

You will join a group of 15 writers tutored by an experienced tutor. We’ll be running two student groups led by acclaimed authors. One group will be taught by Suzannah Dunn and the other group will be taught by Chris Wakling.

If you are selected to take part, we’ll assign you to the tutor group we feel will work best for you and your novel – however if you have a strong preference for one of the tutors, you can indicate this in the form and we will try to take this into consideration.

Your tutor will give direct feedback to students on their novels-in-progress via weekly workshops on our bespoke online forum, targeted writing exercises, and one-to-one tutorials via Zoom. You’ll also get access to teaching videos, notes and resources from our CBC tutor team (listed below) on our online learning platform.

You’ll take part in a Zoom Webinar with a top literary agent Sheila Crowley from Curtis Brown. Plus a literary agent from Curtis Brown/C&W will offer in-depth written advice on your agent letter and elevator pitch. Then at the end of the course, students get to share the opening of their novels informally with the agent teams at Curtis Brown and C&W.

In the nine years since we first launched Curtis Brown Creative, over 110 of our former students have gone on to get major publishing deals for their novels. We’ve had some fantastic success stories across all genres, including online course students Rachel Marks (Saturdays at Noon), Jane Harper (The Dry) and Nicholas Searle (The Good Liar) and soon to be published Polly Crosby (The Illustrated Child). You can read more about our online course success stories here.

While we can’t guarantee publication or representation, we lavish our expertise on our students. The agents of Curtis Brown and C&W are hungry for new authors and will be actively looking for clients among our writers.

‘Suzannah is a fantastic mentor; she brings you out as it were, gets you to talk about yourself and your novel – where it’s going, where it’s not going, what you’re happy about, what you don’t feel you’re managing well.’
Fynvola Le Hunte Ward, CBC alumna

‘Chris was very generous with his time, and provided me with some extremely constructive feedback. He also made the forum discussions fun and guided them so that the feedback was useful. I thought he was an excellent tutor and will refer back to his advice as I write in the future.’

Melissa Echalier, CBC alumna

WHAT DOES THIS COURSE GIVE YOU?

WORKING WITH OTHER WRITERS

We pride ourselves on the tightly-knit writing communities that are established on our courses. As well as getting feedback on extracts from your own novel during the course, we’ll be asking you to read the work of your 14 fellow students week by week, and provide constructive written comments in our online discussion space. We find this process helps students develop their own inner editor and has a hugely positive impact on their own writing. Each week three students will submit 3,000-word extracts from their novels-in-progress to be workshopped by the rest of the group and the tutor. It’ll be your turn to get the group’s dedicated workshop attention two times across the course.

EXCLUSIVE ALUMNI SERVICES

By popular request we have now launched a range of exclusive writing services, available only to the alumni of our selective courses, which you’ll be able to access after your course finishes. These services include individual mentoring from some of our most experienced tutors (you get to choose your supervisor from the available tutors), a five-day intensive zoom/online alumni summer school, editorial reports on your completed novel, submission reports on your ‘pitch package’ and coaching from experienced practitioners. If you’d like further details about these services, and current prices, before applying to this course, you can email us on cbccourses@curtisbrown.co.uk .

Additionally, any students from our selective course who want to formally submit their novels to agents from Curtis Brown or C&W will be given advice and support from the Curtis Brown Creative team with their submission. Full information about this free service is provided during the course.