Finding Your First Novel: From Chaos to Completion

Hello!

After a year of teaching, conversations with readers, and many thoughtful questions about how my novel began, I’m launching a new workshop:

Finding Your First Novel — From Chaos to Completion
A 4-week guided course on beginning, shaping and sustaining your first novel.

If you're sitting with fragments… or circling an idea you can’t quite hold… or halfway through something that feels impossible — this is for you.

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Writing your first novel often feels like standing inside a storm — fragments flying, characters whispering, memories resurfacing, the shape dispersing as soon as you grab it.

This four-week workshop is designed to guide you through that storm.

You’ll learn with Mark Bowles, whose debut novel All My Precious Madness was recognised by the Goldsmiths Prize, The Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Audiobook of the Year. Mark brings a candid, generous and psychologically acute approach to teaching beginning novelists.

If you have a story but no structure (or vis-a-versa!)
If you’re stuck in the middle (or at the beginning, or you just have an end!)
If you’re lost in fragments and don’t know what to do next…

This workshop will help you find your way.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How to identify the emotional engine of your novel

• How to gather and connect fragments

• How to create structure without losing voice or mystery

• How to build a sustainable writing rhythm

• How to finish something as large and unruly as a novel.