‘Being A Writer’ focusses on writers’ creativity and resilience
The Literary Consultancy (TLC) has announced a new programme of support for writers that will focus on cultivating, and safeguarding, literary creativity. Being A Writer will span events, interdisciplinary learning, research, podcasts, and digital content to help writers understand how to sustain and protect their creativity and develop their craft in a range of settings. The programme will culminate in a festival of creativity in celebration of TLC’s 25th anniversary year, in 2021.
The programme, conceived by TLC and co-curated by novelist Julia Forster and TLC Director Aki Schilz, will officially launch with an Interactive Forum on October 23rd in association with the Royal Society of Literature, issuing provocations and inviting conversation around key findings from the RSL’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ writers’ survey. Plans for the programme from January 2020 onwards include ‘Balancing the Books’, geared around sustaining a writing career, interdisciplinary panels exploring how we might learn from other artforms, the revival of TLC’s Secret Life of Novels series lifting the lid on writers’ creative processes, and the launch of an ‘Intervention Toolkit’ for writers, designed to equip them with practical skills and creative solutions to address common issues, from carving out time and space to confronting self doubt.
TLC Director Aki Schilz said:
“The author services market has for a long time been geared towards the ‘end product’, and for good reason: many writers’ greatest wish is to be published. But since its inception in 1996, TLC has focussed on meeting authors on the page where they are writing. We are interested in why writers write, and how to encourage them to keep writing; to invest in their creative process, and give value to that endeavour. A thriving creative community is the only hope for the sustained future of our literary ecology, and with this new programme, we hope we can do our part to support all those who feel they wish to write, because they have something to say, or a story to tell.”
Being a Writer will follow a new and experimental responsive programming format, allowing it to be dynamic and evolve in response to the needs of the writing community. Each element of the programme will inform the next, allowing the writing community that engages with it, to be its co-curators. We hope you will join us at some point in the journey. A website will be unveiled shortly, and the programme will develop over the coming 12 months.
To sign up for updates, please email with the subject header ‘BEING A WRITER’.
