Your First Full Draft with Betsy Cornwell

Course Summary

A welcoming online workshop series focused on practical, accessible tools for finally writing – and finishing! – the first draft of the novel or memoir that’s in your heart, taught by New York Times bestselling author and University of Galway writing teacher Betsy Cornwell. We’ll look at structure, plotting, characterization, and how to plan for a sustainable creative practice – as well as making sure you’ll write a book you would love to read.

Course Outline

Week One: Starting Where We Are

The first session will focus on pushing past the blocks that keep writers from finishing their book drafts – or sometimes from starting them at all. Writers will leave with at least one page of their books drafted before the session is over.

Week Two: Concept and Summary

In this session, we will clarify the high-level concept and scope of our planned books, and create concise one-sentence and one-paragraph summaries to use as guideposts going forward.

Week Three: Characterization

Strong characterization is crucial to both novel and memoir, and we’ll spend this session clarifying and deepening our understanding of the characters we’re writing.

Week Four: Setting

Whether your writing is historical, speculative, or contemporary, it’s equally important to have a vivid understanding of the setting in which it takes place. We’ll do worldbuilding and place-based exercises in this session to find the clearest possible vision of our settings.

Week Five: Point of View

In this session, we will spend time experimenting with different points of view, and looking to examples from both fiction and nonfiction that play with perspective.

Week Six: Creative Practice

In our last session, we’ll make concrete plans for individually tailored creative practice going forward: being honest with ourselves about how much we can write, and when. Participants will commit to a deadline for finishing a first, rough draft of their book.

Throughout the course, participants will be required to produce a certain number of words each week; however, the word count will be set by the participant, and is intended to be a means of accountability for progress with their draft, and will not be judged for quality.

Course Outcomes

Participants will leave the course with a practical understanding of the basic building blocks of their first book. They will also have a concrete plan and schedule for completing their first drafts independently. The course will also provide significant writing time in each online session, as well as weekly word count goals, both of which I’ve consistently found are among the best ways to push past perfectionism and help writers get writing done.

Betsy Cornwell is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and historical novels for young people, and of a memoir forthcoming in autumn 2025. Her writing has appeared in Modern Love, Fairy Tale Review, Parabola, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a BA from Smith College. She is the founder of The Old Knitting Factory, a retreat space for single parents in Connemara.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.