We welcome Lynne Pardoe to the blog. Lynne has been chatting
to Anna Davis, Managing Director of Curtis Brown Creative. Over to you, Lynne.
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| Anna Davis |
I’ve always fancied doing one of those Curtis
Brown courses, they have such an enticing programme of events. Anna Davis found
time in her busy schedule to answer my questions.
How did Curtis Brown, a well-known literary agency, come
to be running a writing school?
We launched Curtis Brown Creative in 2011 when
we realised a lot of people were looking for novel writing courses. We were in
the unusual position of having both a good understanding of the market and
expertise in helping authors edit their work until it’s at its best. The unique
selling point of Curtis Brown Creative is the active involvement in the courses
of our literary agents.
Why choose a Curtis Brown course?
For us, it's all about quality. We want to work
with new novelists who have real potential, and our aims are to help new
novelists to get the best out of their writing and to find new clients for the
agents of Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh from among our students.
Are your courses all London based?
We began with a 3-month course for aspiring
novelists held in our London offices. We still run our very popular 3 and
6-month courses from our offices, but now we also run 3 and 6-month
novel-writing courses online. When it comes to the online environment, we aim
to deliver courses with the same values and emphasis on quality as our
face-to-face courses. We run groups with a maximum of 15 students (just as we
do in our offices) selected from applications on the basis of the quality of
the material submitted to us in order to create strong peer groups who work
well together and help to bring out the best in each other’s writing.
Our online courses have flexible scheduling to
allow participation from students all over the world, along with students who
need to focus their writing into erratic hours, night-times etc. The
online courses include teaching, workshopping and tutorials, just like
our face-to-face courses, and feature an agents’ question and answers day where
lots of our agents come online across a whole day to answer students' question;
plus a day when agents give feedback on students' pitch letters.
What is the difference in the 3 and 6 month courses? Is it just the same course over a different time-frame?
The two kinds
of courses include many of the same components – workshopping, teaching
sessions, tutorials and visiting speaker sessions, but the six-month course has
more of all of those. The six-month London-based course also has two guest
tutors, each of whom come in to teach the students on several occasions – kind
of ‘mini-courses’. I think it’s good for the students to be taught by more than
one writer where possible – there’s no one way of doing things and it’s great
for them to get different teaching perspectives. At the end of all our
courses – in the office and online -the students submit some material from
their novels-in-progress plus a one-page synopsis to be read informally by the
full teams of agents at Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh.
Each course has one main tutor, who is a
novelist with a strong published track record and good teaching experience. I’m
also personally involved in teaching the London-based courses (and we have the
guest tutors as mentioned above). I’m often also involved in delivering
elements of the online course (varies from course to course as indicated in our
website copy).
How does the group communicate?
In the case of the London-based courses, the
students meet on a weekly or twice-weekly basis (and often continue to do so
once the courses end). For the online courses, the students communicate with
each other and their tutor on a secure online educational platform with a
discussion area. The online tutors provide lots of feedback to the students in
that space, and also in one-to-one tutorials which can be on Skype or telephone
(depending on the student’s choice). The tutors also give teaching sessions
(using notes, video and tasks set for the students) on key topics.
Do students have to begin with a partly finished novel?
We ask all applicants to our courses to send in the
opening of a novel - up to 3000 words – and a one –page synopsis (along with
their completed application form). We expect that to be the novel that they
will be working on during the course and assess the applications on that basis.
It doesn’t matter how much of the novel they’ve written already – it could be
just a few thousand words or they might even be rewriting an already completed
novel. But they need to want to work on that novel with us (we’re not here just
to introduce students to agents) and they should be open to the idea of making
changes to it.
What if you
disagree with the advice?
It’s entirely up to the
students what advice they decide to take on board, and what they don’t. Many
students will realise, from feedback they’re given, that there are issues with
a novel in progress, but will find their own solutions. We hope to help
students to figure out their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and
learn to play to their strengths. And, as I say, there’s not much point going
on a course if you’re not actually keen to learn and to make changes to what
you’re writing.
Is there much competition for places?
Yes – I’m happy to
say that we’re always massively over-subscribed. Long may it last! It’s
important that we’re able to be selective in order to bring together groups of
writers who can operate at a high level and give each other valuable feedback
and support. It makes a huge different to the experience of being on a writing course
for our students.
Where do
students go onto once they’ve finished?
Most of our students haven’t actually finished writing
their novels at the end of a three or six month course. Some finish rapidly and
are then ready to start pitching their work to agents, while others may take
years to finish. I’m still hearing now from students in our very early groups
just finishing – and I’m as happy to hear from them as from those in the recent
classes. Writing a novel takes as long as it takes.
Clearly we
can't offer representation to all our students, but 16 of our alumni
already have deals with major commercial publishers, including Jessie
Burton, whose debut The Miniaturist was the biggest selling debut of 2014. Kate
Hamer's The Girl in the Red Coat was published in February to great success,
and James Hannah's The A-Z of You and Me (also February) In July we've also
seen the launch of the first published novel to come out of our online
novel-writing courses: Bitter Fruits by Alice Clark-Platts; and Nicholas
Searle, another online student who was taken on by Curtis Brown CEO Jonny
Geller, is published early next year.
There is lots
of information about our online courses - including course details, fee, tutor
information etc (and indeed information about our other courses too)
on http://www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk .
What an enticing description of a super course! I’m not
surprised that it’s oversubscribed. Thank you so much for taking the time to
talk with me, Anna.
Lynne Pardoe
writes fiction about social work after 30 years in the job which she describes
as a really interesting and rewarding post. Nothing like the papers
description. Read all about it at lynnepardoe.com
or try ‘Please Adopt Me,’ as a kindle book.
*Don't forget that all writers have the chance to pitch to Curtis Brown and Conville and Walsh on the fourth Friday of each month using the hashtag #PitchCB.
Good luck!
If you would like to write for the RNA blog please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com
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