Month One: Structuring your novel

Before moving forward, it’s essential to step back and define the foundations of your story. This month focuses on building (or refining) your novel’s blueprint — clarifying your plot, strengthening your structure, and ensuring your ideas hold together as a cohesive whole. You’ll explore key structural principles and apply them directly to your own work. 

Outcome: Perfect your pitch, a well-developed plot, and a solid structural framework to guide your writing.

Month Two: Mastering point of view

How you tell your story is just as important as the story itself. This month, we’ll take a strategic approach to narrative voice, exploring how different points of view — from omniscient to first person — shape the reader’s experience. You’ll experiment with perspective and learn how to choose and control the most effective approach for your novel. 

Outcome: A confident, purposeful narrative voice and a well-chosen point of view that shapes character, sharpens storytelling, and strengthens your novel as a whole.

Month Three: Crafting atmosphere and dynamic settings

With your novel underway, this month focuses on using setting as a powerful storytelling tool. Rather than serving as a backdrop, your setting should actively shape mood, influence character, and drive the narrative forward — whether you’re writing about a distant planet or an everyday domestic space. You’ll explore advanced techniques to make your world vivid, purposeful, and immersive.

Outcome: A richly realised setting that enhances atmosphere, supports your story, and gives your writing depth, authority, and emotional resonance.

Month Four: Advanced character design

This month, you’ll move beyond familiar character types and develop more complex, fully realised individuals. We’ll explore advanced techniques for deepening motivation, contradiction, and emotional depth, while ensuring your characters are actively shaping — and being shaped by — the plot. The focus is on creating characters who feel authentic, dynamic, and essential to your story’s progression. 

Outcome: The skills and insight to craft layered, compelling characters whose development drives the narrative and leaves a lasting impression on your reader. 

Bonus guest tutor session: Join award-winning author, Dr Yvonne Battle-Felton, for a special guest webinar exploring how to perfect your characters.

Month Five: Explore how to layer emotion and sensory experience

This month focuses on sharpening your writing at the sentence and paragraph level. You’ll explore how to convey emotion indirectly by embedding it within sensory detail, objects, and atmosphere, allowing feeling to emerge organically on the page. Through close analysis of your own work, you’ll learn how to layer meaning and create a more immersive, textured reading experience.

Outcome: Greater control over emotional nuance and sensory detail, with the ability to craft writing that evokes feeling subtly and powerfully throughout your manuscript.

Month Six: Master pacing and tension

Keeping readers engaged depends on how you control the flow of your story. This month, we’ll explore how pacing and tension work together to shape the reader’s experience — from when to slow things down to when to build momentum. You’ll learn how to craft scenes and sequences that sustain interest and create a sense of anticipation, whatever your genre. 

Outcome: A stronger command of pacing and tension, with the ability to shape events and structure your narrative in ways that keep readers hooked and eager to read on.

Month Seven: Crafting a unique narrative voice

Your style is what makes your writing unmistakably yours. This month focuses on developing a distinctive narrative voice — one that feels confident, consistent, and true to your story. You’ll explore how choices in language, rhythm, and tone shape the reader’s experience, and how to refine your style so it enhances both character and narrative.  

Outcome: Greater control over your writing style, with the tools to develop a unique voice and ensure the perspectives within your novel feel authentic, engaging, and compelling.

Month Eight: Perfect your ending

At this stage, you’ll have a full draft and a strong understanding of the techniques shaping your novel. This month focuses on bringing everything together — refining the logic, emotional arcs, and narrative strands to ensure your story feels cohesive and convincing. You’ll explore what makes an ending satisfying, impactful, and true to the world you’ve created.

Outcome: A polished, coherent manuscript with a credible, resonant ending that ties together your plot, characters, and themes.

Month Nine: Shaping voice, clarity and impact when you edit*

This month, we’ll look at your manuscript in its entirety and learn how to turn that first draft into a masterpiece.  

Outcome: The skills and confidence to edit your work effectively, with a more critical eye for voice, structure, and clarity, bringing your manuscript closer to its strongest possible form. 

Month Ten: Preparing for publication*

This month focuses on navigating the path from finished manuscript to publication. You’ll learn how to present your work professionally, from crafting a compelling submission package to researching and identifying the right literary agents for your novel. Through detailed guidance, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how to position your work in the market. 

Outcome: A polished query letter and synopsis, along with a carefully researched shortlist of suitable literary agents, ready for submission.

Month Eleven: Self-publishing and author marketing strategies*

This month explores the different ways you can bring your work to readers, demonstrating how self-publishing can be a creative and viable route for many authors. You’ll learn the core tools of self-publishing, while also developing marketing strategies that are essential for all authors, regardless of the path you choose. The focus is on building a confident, flexible approach to sharing your work and reaching your audience.

Outcome: A clear understanding of self-publishing as a practical option, alongside key marketing skills that will help you successfully promote your work in any publishing context.

Discover the essentials of author branding and indie publishing in a Q&A with self-publishing expert Debbie Young. 

Month Twelve: Get your work discovered*

Share your work in our online showcase, reading to a panel of leading agents and editors. Your work will appear in the Ultimate Novel Writing Course Anthology sent to our full agent network, where around 1 in 3 of our students receive full-manuscript requests. In addition, you’ll be invited to an in-person celebration in London (October 2027) or New York (September 2027).

Outcome: By the end of the 12 month programme, you’ll have a finished, polished manuscript and a clear route to publication. Whether you choose to pursue traditional representation or go indie, you’ll be equipped with the tools, confidence, and connections to launch your writing career.