Workshop Your Opening Chapter with Lauren Chater is an online, six-week-long writing course presented by Faber Writing Academy.
To catch the eye of an agent, publisher or ideal reader, your novel needs to announce itself in its opening pages. Chapter One is your chance to establish the unique cadence of your voice, the stride of your story, and to draw the reader into the sense of time your novel wants to demand of them. But very often, it takes a while for a writer to find their way into a manuscript.
No matter if you are polishing your pages for submission to agents and publishers, partway through your novel and struggling to find the momentum to keep going, or revising only to discover that your manuscript ‘gets going’ halfway through, Workshop Your Opening Chapter is designed to get your novel singing from the very first page. In an intimate group of ten writers, your tutor will guide you through a workshopping process designed to strengthen the opening chapter of your work-in-progress, at the level of the line, the paragraph, and the story, giving you skills you can continue to apply to your manuscript as a whole.
Over the course of six weeks, you will pull apart the first chapters of your favourite published novels, work out what makes them sing, and apply these techniques to your own first chapters. You will use the opening chapters of your novels to investigate the most important questions you’ll need to ask of your work as a whole. The second hour of each class will be dedicated to a thorough workshopping process.
The course will finish with a look towards the future, thinking about strategies to keep you going on your manuscript.
By the end of the course you will have:
- An understanding of how to engage in a sensitive yet rigorous writers’ workshop.
- Received constructive feedback on ~3,500 words of your writing, so that you can measure your improvement.
Your course includes:
- A complimentary copy of a recent A&U publication
- On completion of the course, alumni discounts on future Faber Writing Academy courses and books from the Allen & Unwin website.
This course is a useful introduction to the more rigorous workshopping process which underpins the longer, intensive Faber Writing Academy Writing a Novel course.
