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©Mark Rusher
Writing courses have always fascinated me. I’d see them advertised years ago in the back of the newspaper and more recently online as I browsed social media. I spotted them at my local adult learning centre or in writing magazines and they’d always make me pause and wonder what I was missing. I’d hesitate, drum my fingers, and consider what pearls of wisdom might I learn that would help me move forward because above all, I wanted to write.
At the time I didn’t even really know what I wanted to write. I tried my hand at all formats – in the splendid isolation and privacy of my own kitchen. The result – terrible poetry, mediocre flash fiction and a small amount of success at short stories. The dream was to write a novel, a psychological thriller, but I was unsure where to start. I wanted to be able to build suspense, twist the plot on a single line, create an ending that would leave a reader wanting