Handling Rejection, Building Resilience
In this one-day workshop, Jenny Knight will teach writers how to navigate the process of handling inevitable setbacks, building resilience, and creating a supportive writing community.
About the course
Course Fee
:
Course Dates
Oct. 30 - 3pm
Course Length
One Day
Weekly Study
3 Hours
Testimonial
Course summary
Jenny Knight wrote for 20 years, had several agent almost-rans and one brutal experience before securing her agent – and even then, the rejections didn’t necessarily stop. It’s an inevitable, if painful, part of every writer’s life.
This one-off course offers an empathetic, but constructive, focus on reassuring and effective ways writers can best deal with something we all face at some point – rejection.
To help un-agented and unpublished writers who don’t know where to start, or find the whole process daunting, to gain confidence and a clearer direction in the how, what and where of:
- Researching and finding agents. How to find the right one for you – with an
overview of the submission package to get the best possible result. - Helping you deal with the pain of rejection, build on resilience and the
importance of ‘filling back up’ and finding a writing community so you can
keep moving forwards. - Demystifying, informing and supporting the process of finding agents.
- Understanding what the submission package needs in order to hit the target.
- Building a writers’ toolkit that will help with the inevitable issues of rejection, isolation, confidence and the emotional toll of the writing life.
Using tried and tested ways that have helped other writers, you’ll feel equipped with a better ‘take’ on the whole process of rejection and its emotional toll, and with a clearer sense of confidence and community to keep moving forward with your own writing.
How you will learn
Our team of editors, novelists and scriptwriters will provide a helping hand – making you a more confident writer.
Thanks to our status as a platform for discovering the best literary talent – having helped kick-start the careers of several literary writers to acclaim, such as Nikesh Shukla, Naomi Alderman, Peng Shepherd, Clare Wigfall, Stuart Evers, Inua Ellams and others on the Man Booker Prize longlists – we have far-reaching external networks that create opportunities for your work to get in front of editors, agents and publishers. You will learn through:
- Generating and pitching ideas
- Submissions best practices and feedback
- Live readings & performances
- Writing and sharing your work online
- Specialist workshops
- Live salons
The Tutor
Jenny Knight
Jenny Knight is a prize-winning writer of short story, fiction and memoir and a contributor to the celebrated Common People anthology, edited by Kit de Waal (May 2019). An experienced editor, copy-writer, copy-editor and proofreader, she enjoyed 25 years’ successful freelancing for publishers including Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Routledge, and her writing on writing and the publishing world has appeared in Book Machine, National Writers’ Centre and Restless. She was selected for PenguinRH WriteNow 2018, a 2019 Arts Council/TLC Award, is a National Centre for Writing Case Study and has won or been listed in many competitions including Bridport, Fish, Arvon, ACE/Escalator, Yeovil, Riptide and SWWJ.
She’s taught creative writing in prisons and Higher Education, spoken on panels and held workshops on the writing process, getting agents and dealing with rejection – including recently for PrimadonnaFest and the 2020 Lockdown Stay-At-Home-Fest. She has a degree in English Literature & Drama, studied Creative Writing at UEA and is never happier than when reading, writing or critiquing writers from a diverse range of fiction and non-fiction.
