Courses FAQ

Srsly? No one questions musicians who go to music school. No one questions photographers who go to photography school. No one questions painters who go to painting school.

We teach techniques and theories, we offer exercises to focus ideas, we talk about great writers and the way they do things. It’s really not very controversial.

You don’t, but they are written so each unit builds on the last.

You can dip in and out as time allows for as long as you have course access, but we do recommend you do it in the order we present the information to you for best results.

Our courses are a mix of text, videos and writing exercises. You can access all of them if you’re a fully-fledged WHQ member, for the duration of your membership.

There are no assignments to hand in and no live sessions to turn up to – you can access the course materials in your own time and at your own pace – you’ll get out of our courses what you put in. The forum is always open for discussion and sharing your writing, and you can find posts on particular courses by searching for the course tag.

We run a handful of free courses. Just sign up and take ’em!

Our courses are a mix of text, images, videos and exercises.

Once you’ve enrolled, you’ll be a sent a link to your course(s). When you click it you’ll be taken to the course player where you’ll see a menu on the left-hand side detailing the different course sections and units, and on the right you’ll see the course content.

Make sure you set aside a bit of time each day to read, watch and do. We can’t stress enough how important it is to do all the exercises set in the courses. We’d love to be able to plug a cable into your brain and – voila! – an entire novel or short story collection comes out! Buuuuut we can’t, and to get the results you have to do the work. It’s supposed to be fun though, so try to enjoy it a little bit.

String length etc etc. It depends on many factors. Each course has an expected duration which you can find on the course page, it’s typically about six weeks, but you can do it as quickly or take as long as you need. We recommend that you put aside at least an hour every day to work on your course. If you can do more, do more! We recognise that isn’t always possible and we do give advice throughout the courses on ways to carve out the time.

We can’t guarantee that, unfortunately, but we have a pretty good track record with our writers. Look for the Toot Your Flute blogs in the magazine to see just how well our writers are doing.

We’re closed for critiquing services right now, sozzz. Keep an eye on our socials for when we re-open. In the meantime we have an excellent forum full of helpful and knowledgeable writers, with a dedicated section for matching up critiquing partners.

No worries!

Just go to My Account > Account Details > Membership.

Then select ‘My Membership’ > Subscription and press the big cancel button.

If you have a monthly subscription, you’ll still have access until the end of your billing period.

A super important point: we CANNOT offer partial refunds on subscriptions. This means if you cancel part way through the month, we cannot part refund that month. Soz McGoz.