Let’s start with the universities’ dirty secret...

If you attend a Creative Writing MA in the UK, less than a quarter of your fees are spent on tuition. They're spent on laboratories, studios, snooker rooms and Vice Chancellors. If you’re studying Biochemistry or Optometry or Film Making, you probably need those facilities; if you’re studying Creative Writing, you don’t. All you need are the best tutors, the most experienced practitioners…. Don’t waste your money on building a new Student Union.

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For more than a decade, we ran the groundbreaking Novel Writing MA at City, University of London. More than 1 in 6 of our students went on to publish their novels, making CityNovel the highest achieving course in the UK. 

But eventually we tired of trying to work within the university system – the increasing fees, the decreasing budget, the interminable bureaucracy – and decided to establish FYN.

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Yes, there are also shorter courses – run by newspapers or publishers or agencies – and they will teach you the basics (though they have no quality control). But they teach the same thing to the whole cohort – they tend to offer very little one-to-one time. And yet every novel is different, and every novelist approaches the task differently. 

 

We know that. Our service is based on tailoring our approach to you – what you need help with, not the stuff you’re good at.  We know how to tease out:

 

The Novel You Should Be Writing

(we all try to write at least one novel we shouldn’t or can’t)

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The Voice You Should Be Using

who are you really interested in?  (You think ‘he’ should be narrating the novel but actually you’re much more interested in that woman standing at the back, what does she think? Give her the POV and suddenly it comes alive)

 

The Turning Points In The Story

plot is so important: it makes the reader turn the page but, far more importantly, it helps you write the next. We are experts at finding the ‘crunch’ in your story and making sure you foreground these moments.

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