Philip Womack: Writing Mentor

Philip is the author of several children’s books, including ‘The Liberators’, ‘The Double Axe’, ‘The Arrow of Apollo and Wildlord’. His first novel, ‘The Other Book’, was published in 2008. He has taught Creative Writing at London University, and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. He reviews regularly for the national newspapers, including the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review. His first non-fiction book, ‘How to Teach Classics to Your Dog’, was published in 2020.

Specialises in: Children’s books, YA, literary fiction, fantasy, literary biography.

Philip provides tuition for our Mentoring Service and is a tutor on our Ultimate Novel Writing Course.

If mentoring had been available when I started out as a writer in the early 2000s, I would have jumped at the chance. I knew so little about how to write a book: research processes, structure, method; and even less about the publication process as a whole, the whole bewildering shebang from initial idea to finished product. Now, several years later, and eight books down the line, I have learned a lot: and I’ve also learned through engaging with other writers. I’ve written seven literary novels for children, one non-fiction book for adults, and one screenplay: and every time I finish a project, I’ve discovered a whole lot more. I wish I’d had the chance to engage with a mentor on each of those projects.

Mentoring is a chance to engage with a writer on a profound level. You may be coming to writing completely cold, in which case it will be a chance to think about how to develop an idea: how to nurture that spark into something that can take hold. You may be coming to it with something a bit more finished: in which case, it might be an opportunity to wrestle with the idea, and to see how redrafting and rethinking can push you into new and exciting directions.

Over the years, I’ve done various different kinds of mentoring. I’ve mentored students on their MAs: we read through their work, line by line, thinking about plot, character development, style, and every aspect of the writing process, from rhetorical devices to overarching plot movements and genres. I love helping people discover new ways of looking at things, and seeing edited work progressing is thrilling.

I’ll help you to understand the genre you’re writing in: to discover the voice that can be uniquely yours.