Louise Dean launches 90-day writers' community

Booker Prize-longlisted author Louise Dean has launched a community to help writers produce a novel in 90 days.

Dean, who was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 for her first book Becoming Strangers (Scribner), has launched The Novelry, a place for writers to develop their work quickly, with "useful" feedback. The community is "particularly helpful for authors within to grow their first novels", Dean said.

She told The Bookseller: "I am about to write my fifth novel in 90 days. But not just that I am doing it in company, I am coaching a group of novelists online daily. They get their instructions in the morning and they write in the evening. There are over 200 candidates for the 90-day write and more than 10 members have started on the preparation materials. We kick off in earnest on 2nd April.”

Speaking about the decision to launch The Novelry, Dean said she was "sick of writing on [her] own — for 16 years."

She added: "Everything else benefits from being collegiate, from team work, but writing is something to be done solo and in the dark with really quite random results because you get no feedback. I was convinced it would be better in an age where we are so social and have the tools to be social at our fingertips. The risk factor had always been the quality of feedback and time, and it seemed to me that writers with skin in the game would be likely to be more careful and constructive than any other group."

A former Arvon Foundation tutor, Dean said: “We all have day jobs… but if you don’t just resolve to get it done, I suspect you never will.”

Dean is the author of four books: Becoming Strangers (Scribner), winner of the Betty Trask Prize; This Human Season (S&S); The Ideas of Love (Penguin); and The Old Romantic (Fig Tree).
 Writers can sign up here.