This online workshop will help you identify all the rhetorical tools and narrative devices needed to develop convincing narratives for commercial publication.
Using lessons from crime fiction and other genres, explore craft techniques that will help you sustain your writing practice, including voice, pace, structure and character development.
You Will Learn:
- How to create compelling characters and credible narrative worlds that the reader will connect with.
- The importance of voice.
- Story building: the necessity of pacing and the art of building and sustaining narrative tension.
- Story levels: what needs to go into the manuscript and what can be submerged in the story.
This page is for those who wish to sign up for the workshop only. If you’d like to attend the workshop and also receive feedback on your drafts, sign up for our Fiction Fundamentals and Crime Fiction Feedback Clinic.
For the full experience, you can sign up for a workshop to get started and meet your tutor before you submit work for feedback from the tutor and your peers across a three-month period via our online forum.
Together the workshop and Online Feedback Clinic are ideal for those starting their crime fiction writing journey.  For more information on our online feedback clinics, please read our FAQs.
About the Tutor:
Dr Ruth McIver is an award-winning crime writer represented by The Story Factory, and a sessional academic with an interest in genre fiction, memoir and true crime. Her books include: I Shot the Devil, Blackout (Audible), The Sound (2025) and The Sunset Club.
For more information, visit writersvictoria.org.au
Image: Portrait of Ruth McIver
