Our Story
How it all began...
We’re working writers; passionate, energetic and committed. We are here because we love storytelling and working with writers like you. We work with writers one by one to bring their books to life. It’s a pleasure and a privilege and we cheer each and every writer through every milestone of their achievements.
We operate a policy of people before profit, which means we work with people we want to work with, because we love what we do. It helps create a community of mutual respect and understanding. It’s what keeps The Novelry a safe place.
The Novelry is a homely place in which you can be yourself, only more so.
And then there’s the Chief Wellness Officer, Blue. Small, fluffy and formidable he attends to the matter of a healthy writing-life balance.
As a team of authors and editors, we meet twice a week to put our heads together on our writers’ storylines. We look at every story before our writers get too far into the writing, so they can write with confidence in the right direction. Bold stories, beautifully told; that’s what the world’s best literary agents have come to expect from our writers.
We support our writers by believing in them, helping them carve out time and space, doing some of the heavy-lifting of plotting and planning, and guiding them all the way to achieving their ambition. So much more than a writing course, The Novelry offers a working apprenticeship with hands-on help to accelerate your learning process to write fiction to the highest standard.
We’ll look forward to giving you a warm welcome soon.
Tools not rules
We don’t believe there is a textbook method or set of rules, templates or a formula for writing a book.
But the history of fiction provides us with a fantastic set of tools we can use to give our writers fast-track insights and techniques.
Created by Louise, a Booker-listed author, our unique and fun course content will take you through these tools, helping you power through your writing with (relatively) pain-free plotting, saving you time and frustration as you dodge the rookie errors (over-writing and more) and deepen your understanding of how great storytelling works.
The Five Fs ®
Novels don’t use a 3-act structure. The novel is an immersive art form allowing the reader to assume the experience and outlook of the narrator in a particularly intimate relationship, one-to-one. Every novel is, in a sense, a moral journey for the main character. We will walk you through this simple but elegant story structure to deliver a satisfying ending.
Since Aristotle wrote about the form of tragedy (which is at the heart of big stories, even comedic ones), a five-part structure has been used to help articulate longer stories. At The Novelry, we keep it simple; you can literally count the parts of novel structure on one hand with our very own Five Fs.
The Story First Method ®
Readers don’t want fancy words. They want page-turning stories. (So do publishers!) So we start from the ground up by making sure you’re writing a story that excites you and one that’s more likely to get published so you’re not wasting your valuable time. We help you come up with the idea (The Classic– stage 1 of our process) and then we help you plot and plan it and write it (The Ninety Day Novel– stage 2.)
We think the soubriquets of planner or pantser are a bit silly. The truth lies in the middle. You need to know your destination, but the route you take is part of the pleasure of writing fiction. So we offer a nimble one-page planning method allowing you to stay on track on the hoof, updating your route map as your story and all its mysteries unfold on the white page. Even better, we offer an interactive planning process, allowing us to keep sight of your one-page plan as you develop your story. The wonder of the one-pager? It contains all the essentials publishers, literary agents and readers want from a book. We don’t keep it a secret or hold this vital info back from you until after you have written your novel. At The Novelry, you will know what’s required right from the start you can write with confidence.
Our one-hour a day writing method
Because there’s never a good time to write a novel, now there’s a good place. Forget that snowy mountain lodge with you, the writer, possessed with inspiration, penning your great modern classic day and night with no interruptions. Not going to happen!
But why delay the pleasure (and joy) of writing fiction when it brings so much to your daily life? It is the secret of published authors, that writing a novel really only needs your butt on a seat for an hour a day. One hour? No excuses! Keeping in touch with your novel but allowing for eureka moments in the shower and for real life to infuse every scene makes for a good book. With our help and direction, you won’t worry about the mountaintop but can enjoy your hour of writing daily, in which you are simply writing one short scene at a time. (Enjoy our daily live online Golden Hour of writing together online across the world!)
How it all began...
In the spring of 2017 author Louise Dean had a problem; the loneliness of the long-term writer. Here she explains why she started The Novelry and what it’s come to mean to writers.
Could we write together?
After almost twenty years working solo, with four novels published, I began to wonder why of all the arts and crafts, writing was an exception to the benefits of collaboration. All those years, I’d been writing in the dark, and when I finally got some feedback from my agent or an editor, it came late in the day when the novel was done! I felt I could use some company while I was writing. I was tired of writing alone.
So I decided to write a different way, with other writers writing alongside me at the same time to help me stay on track.
The Bookseller publicised my experiment and some 200 writers offered to join me. For the next 90 days I wrote ‘live’ and put together the course materials for what would become our first online writing class, The Ninety Day Novel.
The Ninety Day Novel
I recorded the videos for the course daily as I wrote my novel, simply telling people what I was doing and when, and sharing the creative process. I’d been figuring out how writers write for more than 20 years. But I thought that en route I’d consult with great writers, living and dead. I show, for example, how Kerouac drops you into a scene and makes it all feel familiar, how Muriel Spark uses flash-forwards, and how the Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee’s prose is composed using poetry and computer-like coding.
Showing how to structure and pace a novel as you write has proven useful to many, and I’m grateful to so many writers for trusting me with their journey.
A different writing course
Because writing can be so daunting, it’s good to have someone show you how it’s done in a practical way. We have a lot of fun in the coaching sessions and at the community. We get to know each other at The Novelry. We know what drives us to put pen to paper. By being open and honest, we become close for sure. But there’s more. You need to tap into your human frailty if you want to write a book that feels real.
It’s thanks to our writers sharing their writing lives with each other so generously that we have more five-star reviews on Trustpilot than any other online writing course. We have created a warm, safe place in which writers can grow their writing skills and confidence.
Building the best team
As the number of writers grew, they needed other writers to teach them, authors working in genres in which they were truly expert: fantasy fiction, speculative fiction, crime, romance, historical, suspense, children’s fiction. The Novelry needed young blood, brilliantly published writers, award-winning and bestselling. Our writers deserved the best. But I had to be careful to find authors who could teach writing and care for my writers as much as I did. I was blessed to find our team of writing mentors, one by one, and we have learned so much by working and writing together. We’re able to share our thinking on each and every writer’s work, offering ideas and suggestions for their stories, when we meet as a team every week.
Bring on the editors!
What if we could bring some of the very best publishing editors in the business to help our writers shape their stories for success? So we sought editors with phenomenal reputations, who had worked with global bestselling author names at Big 5 publishers like Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan and Hachette; editors who had wonderful working relationships with literary agents too. We wanted to give our writers the very best advice throughout the writing process, even before they put pen to paper. To help them succeed for submission to agents we knew we had to bring in the editors who acquired books from those agents. So we did! It’s been thrilling to have our SAS team of editors at The Novelry to ensure our wonderful success stories.
Celebrating our writers all the way
During the pandemic, we began bringing famous names to teach writing classes live: Paula Hawkins, Louise Doughty, Mark Billingham, Meg Rosoff, Val McDermid, Jessie Burton and many more.
We added weekly online writing classes and special writing groups, and a community where writers could workshop their writing, that was open 24/7 worldwide.
As our writers began completing their books it was time to find them literary agents. Over the last two years we’ve made some great working friendships and seen our writers through to literary agency representation and publishing contracts. We’re proud to work with the leading literary agents in the UK and the USA.
And now we can get together again, well there are parties annually for our writers in London and New York, and the chance to give our buddies hugs and thanks for all their support.
The home of happy writing
We work together as a team to bring great stories to life and it is our pleasure and privilege to be part of your story.
Welcome home, writers!
In this small part of your life, you get to play god. With so much outside of our control, taking an hour for you in which you get to call the shots is deeply consoling. Plus, we get to live more lives than one when we write fiction. It’s the ultimate vacation. What we write outlives us. It’s what remains of us and our time here. We connect our lives, our desires, hope and fears with those of others with enduring possibilities and meaning. As writers, we leave something behind us.
A story is driven by change, and so are our lives.
The magic of writing is that what we write changes us too. As we start putting one word after another, we begin to consider our theme, our values, we consider the roads taken and the roads not taken. We become a new version of ourselves by getting other versions down on the page. It’s fascinating not only what goes on to the page, but what doesn’t – who you are when you stand up after writing can be mysteriously different from who you were when you sat down.
Writing a book begins a new chapter of your life.
Don’t miss the opportunity to discover your story, and more about who you are and who you want to become.
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