We offer a lively children's ficiton writing group, dedicated children's fiction writing classes and a brilliant (Carnegie Medal listed) children's fiction author tutor. Your year with us starts with the Classic Course, a powerful storytelling foundation course particularly suited to writers of children's fiction. We'll combine the ingredients of the bestselling books of all time with your own unique life experience to create a powerful, original story. We're going to dig deep into the first stories that moved you to unearth the story only you can tell.

Learn the plot elements used by bestselling authors JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and more. You’ll leave the course with your story idea and plot mapped out, ready to write your children's novel.

Begin at the very beginning. Once upon a time...

You'll be on the edge of your seat. 

A stand-alone course to take at your own speed in your own time. The lessons may take you 20 to 30 minutes to read, and the prompts or exercises can take as long as you want to give them. They'll certainly get you thinking, and creating! The course was created to help you come up with a big story idea. No previous experience or written work in progress needed. Here's where your story starts.

Susie Bower's novel The School for Nobodies is featured in The Independent's top ten picks, ranked alongside all-time classics such as The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 'A rip-roaring adventure featuring a lost twin, circus tricks and shape-shifting.' Susie took all the courses in our Book in a Year plan and The Novelry pitched her manuscript to our literary agency friends at Peters, Fraser + Dunlop.

“I joined an amazing online writing community called The Novelry. Up until then, I’d only written full-length fiction for adults but had got to the point where I’d lost momentum and couldn’t finish anything. I wailed to Louise at The Novelry that I had no ideas and she assured me that after the first week of The Novelry’s Classic course – I’d have something. She was right.”

Polly Ho-Yen.

Polly's first novel, Boy in the Tower, was published in 2014 by Random House Children's Publishers, and nominated for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. Her second novel Where Monsters Lie was published in 2016 and her third novel, Fly Me Home, was published in 2017. Both of these novels were also nominated for the Carnegie Medal. When you sign up for our Book in a Year plan, you can choose Polly as your tutor.