South Manchester Writers Workshop

We meet every Tuesday, 7:30 to 9:30, at the Emmanuel Church, Barlow Moor Road, Didsbury. We're open to new members, but please get in touch before you turn up - sometimes we have to run a waiting list. Your first session's free, to see how we do things, and then we charge enough each time - at the moment it's £2.50 - to cover the hire of the room and a coffee half-way through.

We're basically a "work-in-progress" group. The backbone of a Tuesday evening meeting is half a dozen people reading out what they've been working on, so that the rest of the group can comment, criticise and question. Then a different half a dozen the next week.

Our focus is very much on getting published. That doesn't mean we don't welcome beginners and hobbyists of course. You'll find discussion of characterisation and dialogue development, for example, in a normal evening's work, then the next week we might be talking about literary agents and how to make them notice something someone's working on.

It's usually a selection of novels-in-progress with a leavening of short stories and poetry. We've had memoirs, science fiction, horror, children's fiction, and don't be surprised if somebody hands you a play script during coffee to try out the dialogue together. We'll try (almost) anything.

Some of our books and things