Courses

Moniack in a Month – Come Over to the Dark Side: Crime Writing with Karen Campbell   What’s on the surface and what lies beneath? Whether it’s prising open closed doors, shattering facades, unearthing secrets or reaching beyond the uniform, crime fiction can be your key to exploring truth, society and what makes us human. From concept to conclusion, we’ll learn about the building blocks and tools you need to write your novel.   On this course, we’ll look at developing plot, character, place and pace to make your story sing– plus you’ll get an exclusive ‘Cop Clinic’ – an insider’s guide into what makes the polis tick! Remember, there is light and dark in everyone…  

Come to find your rhythm and your voice, unravel your ideas, craft harmonious developments, and cut away excess noise from prelude to finale so that your work can sing.

In this engaging course, you’ll create dozens of new poems and develop a sustainable writing practice. Suitable for poets of all levels of confidence, we’ll offer prompts and exercises guaranteed to get your pen moving and keyboards clicking.

How do you begin to approach transforming stage plays for cinema? How do take the very specific experience
of watching a play and its frequently non-naturalistic conventions, and tell that same story in a more visual medium?

Improve your Gaelic Fluency through telling Tales of the Fianna. Thoir feabhas air do chuid Gàidhlig tro aithris Sgeulachdan na Fèinne.

Drawing from the corpus of Fianna tales in Scottish Gaelic, tutor Ruairidh Maclean will guide participants through a series of three 1-hour virtual sessions to tell their own 5 minute Gaelic story.

This course will help you finish that first draft with workshops and tutorials on plot and character, on sharpening your descriptions, writing scenes and creating distinctive, propulsive, persuasive voices.

This course is for anyone who has started or is in the midst of writing a novel and would like to write in a community of writers, learn more about craft and process, set individual goals and get feedback on a synopsis and an extract of your work.

Are you passionate about writing fiction with young adult protagonists? This week will give you the motivation you need to develop your knowledge and skills.

How do you a hook a reader’s attention and create suspense? If you already have a criminal idea that you want to put on the page, this course is for you.

An intensive but very enjoyable course of writing and reading with ‘the best poetry teachers in the world’ (The Guardian).  Taking classic and contemporary poems as model and stimulus, we will create perhaps as much as a small pamphlet in just one week.  Insightful editorials, informal discussion and entertaining evening reading sessions will make this a truly memorable course. 

Bidh an dà bhùth-obrach seo (gach tè uair a thìde) a’ toirt sùil air na sgeulachdan Gàidhlig a lorgar air an làraich-lìn Sgeulachdan nan Gaisgeach. Bidh leasaiche na làraich, an craoladair, ùghdar is sgeulaiche Ruairidh MacIlleathain, a’ mìneachadh a’ chorpais – sgeulachdan de na Fianna agus gaisgich eile à dualchas nan Gàidheal ann an Alba – agus mar a rinn e ath-sgrìobhadh orra airson an dèanamh nas freagarraiche airson Gàidheil an latha an-diugh.

Have you often wanted to write, but aren’t sure where to begin? Perhaps you don’t yet know what shape you’d like your writing to take, whether that’s poetry, short story, fiction or non-fiction. Whatever stage you’re at, these workshops will tackle the basics of writing in any form, looking at language, imagery, plot and character.

Spend the end of 2021 at Moniack Mhor beside a toasty wood burner with a mug of tea and your manuscript. We’ll get the mince pies in.

Findlay Napier and Boo Hewerdine write songs from observations and real life experience. During this week long course, you too, can learn the power of turning narrative into song.