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Jericho Writers and the Self Edit Course with Debi Alper

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 Jericho Writers

Back in early summer when I was finishing writing my shitty first draft of my novel I came across Jericho Writers through watching a webinar delivered by the writer Lucy Atkins (Lucy is the writer of Magpie Lane and The Night Visitor, amongst other books). She mentioned that it helps when approaching agents if you can show that you've put some effort into learning the trade of writing, and Jericho Writers was one of the learning environments she referenced.

So I joined, and boy, what learning I encountered from day one. There are masterclasses and webinars, videos and events. One of the first things I watched was a recording from a previous 'Summer Festival of Writing' where Debi Alper was delivering a session about self-editing. I immediately took to her and the approach she takes to editing.

I was delighted as I carried on searching through the JerichoWriters.com website and found that Debi runs a six week course with Emma Darwin on how to edit your novel. I booked my place and carried on finishing my novel. And then the course started, end of September.

Wow! What a learning experience. Firstly work was put in to developing us as an online community, helping us to reach a place where we were comfortable (hmmm ok, maybe not quite comfortable 😆 ) with sharing our work with a group of strangers. Then we got into the actual work. And that's where the wow comes in.

As a group of participants we were encouraged to give feedback on each other's homework before Debi gave feedback. Then, a few days later Debi went into detail with her analysis of our writing, and boy, was it thorough. But you know, the feedback process was also invaluable. I was lucky to share the course with a group of 11 other really skilled writers who were prepared to put time in to giving feedback, and we all found that by giving feedback ourselves we grew to understand the week's lesson in greater detail.

After all that each week, Emma Darwin then gave us her take, with a mass of links to useful articles - I'm still working my way through them, there is such a wealth of information that we are given access to.

There are few courses where you get such support from the learning community and from the course tutors. I feel extremely privileged to have got a place on the Self Editing course at just the right time in my journey so that I could understand my novel is not an epistolary, it's historical fiction (how could I not know that as I was writing it? 😂 ). I learned about improving the point of view of my main character, and psychic distance (I can't spoil that one for you - when you learn about psychic distance your writing world will change forevermore!), prose and much much more. I also got such strong support and praise which has encouraged me to keep at this.

And so now I have moved from a short list of acknowledgements (my mum, my best friend, my daughter ... hmmm ... oh yeah, my husband) to having a long list of all my course colleagues as well as Debi and Emma in my acknowledgements, without whose help my novel would never have had the chance to be picked up by an agent or publisher. Now I'm doing the higher level work of editing that is going to take my fabulous plot based in Liverpool in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s into being a novel that people will want to read. And I hope I can report back next year that it's been picked up by an agent ... and then a publisher. Watch this space.

If you choose just one course when you have a first draft to get editing, it has to be the Self Editing course through Jericho Writers. It's worth every penny ... and dare I say it's worth more! My only regret ... the course has finished.

Alongside the Self Edit course, I have to say that Jericho Writers is also worth every penny. It's the best decision I made to join over the summer, and I feel very lucky to have found such a supportive community.

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