Courses

The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics Highland Stravaig will take place this year in Abriachan, a community set high in the hills above the western shores of Loch Ness.

Join novelist Cynthia Rogerson for an informal writing group the first Sunday of every month.

How to write your own story? How best to tell it? What to include, what to leave out? In joint and individual sessions the tutors will offer guidance on the many and varied approaches to life writing, highlighting the importance of place, character, perspective, structure, and the self-reflective voice.

Louise Welsh and Val McDermid will share the lessons they’ve learned from their long and successful crime writing careers and work closely with aspiring writers, to help them shape their work in the genre.

Join novelist Cynthia Rogerson for an informal writing group the first Sunday of every month.

It’s inevitable that you’ll find yourself in front of a microphone at a spoken word night, or in a school, or at a book festival, and be expected to give a good account of yourself and your writing. This can be nerve-wracking, but also incredibly exciting.

Gaelic ‘waulking songs’, rowing-songs, sea-shanties, market-cries, marching-chants for military recruits in training, work-songs of all kinds raised their voices and used rhythm and rhyme to sing out loud. What is the equivalent in the here and now?

This course will give you a set of tools to improve your fiction writing. Alternate workshops with Janice and Richard will guide you on aspects of the tuning up process: sharpening your dialogue, editing, understanding the difference between show and tell, and dramatisation.

Have you ever felt put off, thinking you don’t know enough about science – or fantasy – or young people – to write your own YA SF/Fantasy stories? Some of the most page-turning writing being published today is YA SF/Fantasy, and this course will help you become part of it.

What is the real-life story or specialist subject you wish to explore in writing? And what is the best form for your content? Over the course of this tutored retreat, you will be working closely with two experienced writers of narrative and themed non-fiction.

This week is an opportunity to develop your ongoing work in a supportive and inspiring environment. Whether stuck in the middle of a project, attempting to whip a messy first draft into decent shape or applying the final tweaks and polish to your manuscript, we will be on hand to offer detailed one-to-one tutorials catered for your individual needs.

Summer holidays can be full of activity, but not necessarily with regards to your craft. We can promise you the opportunity to focus on your writing, fuelled by fresh fruit from the garden.

Jacob’s workshop will be a mixture of reading new things – or of reading familiar things in a new light – discussion and writing.

Give your writing the space it deserves. Supported by tutors Karen and Adam, our tutored crime-writing retreat will let you unravel ideas, craft plot twists and turns and cut away excess flesh in your work. Enjoy individual tutorials and the alchemy of being with other writers. Inspiration guaranteed!

The purpose of this course is to accelerate the students’ development as writers of historical fiction.

Whether you consider yourself a beginner, or an experienced writer, Jen and Billy will be on hand to explore your poetry, offer support, motivation, and detailed advice through one-to-one tutorials.

Wondering how to make your readers smile or – even better – laugh out loud? Wodehouse/Weldon/Lodge/Spark. What actually makes a comic novel comic? And how can you create your own?

Do you know the feeling – you’re full of ideas, but when you sit down to write that first chapter, verse or scene, life gets in the way?

This course will cover all the things we love about writing radio plays. We’ll look at ways of coming up with an initial idea, thinking about acoustics, writing a successful first scene, the relationship between writer and producer, and the end experience of recording in the studio.

The longer nights can be heaven for busy writers. Expand that time by joining us for a week with little distraction, and the  permission to concentrate on your work.

This course will explore the form and the genre and discuss some of the methods and techniques that writers have used to unsettle and frighten even the most level-headed of readers.

On our first ever course on this specialised genre in children’s literature your tutors, who both write and illustrate their own books, will guide you through the process, with analysis of examples, historical and contemporary, ethical and trail blazing, based on their own experiences in this particular field of publishing.

What does the sky taste like? What landscape best describes your mood? What images appear when you hear a certain strain of music?

This course offers a different perspective on the writing business, aiming to demystify the process and explain how publishers, agents and authors work together.

Through a wide-ranging series of workshops and writers’ surgeries, Chitra Ramaswamy and Peter Geoghegan will examine two of the most important concepts in journalism and non-fiction: the self and place.

In this week as well as exploring the fundamentals of songwriting we will look at how exciting a collection of related work can be.

Join us for a week where writing time is top priority before Christmas sets in. A manuscript polish could be the perfect treat to yourself. Mulled wine and mince pies included.