Courses

If you think you have the writing bug but you’re unsure how to get started, Karin and Andrew will guide you through that difficult space between wanting and doing, the ambition and the act.

This course is aimed at writers of all levels, from beginners to published authors, who wish to hone and develop their non-fiction, be it memoir, biography, travel, life writing, nature or place writing.

Escape to Moniack Mhor for the last few days of summer to focus on your writing without the distractions of daily life. If inspiration evades you, go looking for it during a lovely long walk in the woods.

As the weather begins to turn, let Moniack Mhor be the backdrop to your latest writing project. Have a wander round the garden for a leg stretch, say hello to the Highland cows next door, and look out for the Moniack Mhor hare!

In a course aimed at new and developing writers, we’ll look at these questions and more, exploring dramatic structure and how to work it to your advantage, balancing craft with inspiration, and taking your play from first to final draft.

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?

What’s the heart of your story and how might you find the voice in which to tell it? What techniques can you use to anchor a narrative so it feels true to your lived experience?

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.

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.

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. 

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.