The sun was shining on us as we met with 26 writers for the Spring Away Day on May 21. We were delighted to see a mixture of guests who’ve attended our online events and some new faces, all taking the Saturday to invest in their writing lives. The day began with strong coffee and light chatter. Then, the group settled in for a workshop on voice, dialogue and prose with author and tutor Emma Darwin.

Emma explained different ways of injecting more life into your prose and asked everyone to write a modern poem about a character in their work-in-progress. Though it was challenging at first, most of the group found the exercise incredibly freeing, and one writer even thought she’d found an epigraph for her novel! Emma talked about the power of half-rhymes in prose, and by lunch everyone was feeling pretty inspired.

There’s nothing like healthy but delicious food to keep creativity flowing, so BPA prepared a spread of some local deli favourites, including bang bang chicken, rice noodle salad, roasted mushrooms, and caramelised onion quiche. The weather allowed us to dine al-fresco! It was great to hear from some guests about their writing processes and different approaches to getting their work out there – and many were planning to submit to the First Novel Award.

After taking some pictures – we were all admirers of Jess’s dress with the book motif and we couldn’t not get a shot with Gena and her orange get-up in front of the purple alliums and white hesperis – the group filled up on coffee and tea and returned to the main room for the final session with Emma. Time to talk dialogue. Emma described ways of producing natural dialogue even when writing exposition and shared a brilliant example from Ruth Ware’s One by One – definitely take a look at the opening chapters if you’re struggling with wooden dialogue/unnatural exposition.

To finish the day, we were delighted to welcome literary agent (and Bookseller Rising Star 2021) Charlotte Seymour from Johnson & Alcock for a Q&A. After enjoying some homemade flapjacks and lemon drizzle cakes, we turned our attention to Charlotte for all her top tips, which included approaching early career agents, writing a cover letter pitch in the style of a book blurb, and mentioning your idea for book two. She encouraged the group not to give up if they didn’t sign a deal with their first novel: ‘I just placed an author with the third novel we worked together on. Often It’s finding the right thing and the right editor at the right time. If you don’t sell the first book it might be for the best because the second book will be bigger, pacier, better.’

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Away Day and to our guests, Emma Darwin and Charlotte Seymour. If you’d like to hear about future events, please sign up to our mailing list or bookmark our events page.