Find inspiration, build confidence and start your story with three mini lessons and writing exercises from beloved CBC tutor and acclaimed author, Simon Wroe.
Simon Wroe is an award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of the novels Chop Chop (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and winner of the Society of Authors’ Betty Trask Award) and Here Comes Trouble (shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize). His latest novel, Ghost Month, was published by Faber in 2026. He has written for the Guardian, the Economist, The Times and the Independent, among others, and teaches novel-writing at Curtis Brown Creative. He also wrote the screenplay for 'Sweet Dreams', a mixed-media film funded by the BFI and Factory International, staged at Aviva Studios in Manchester in 2024, starring Munya Chuwawa, Morgana Robinson, and Reggie Watts.
Learn how to come up with characters, how to make them believable and how to make them compelling for readers.
This lesson is all about nailing the opening of your story from the set up to the inciting incident.
The final lesson of this mini-course is all about using scenes to convey the action and events in your story.