5-Day Self-guided Awaken Your Senses Intensive
Make your writing come alive!
it comes from attention.
The 5-Day Self-Guided Awaken Your Senses Intensive trains you to notice what’s actually in front of you and put it on the page in a way that makes readers feel they are standing right there with you.
If you tend to write from habit, from memory, from inside your own mind, then your writing risks becoming flat and safe. This course is the antidote to that.
Over five days, you’ll slow down, pay attention and write what you actually perceive. You’ll learn how bestselling, award-winning authors integrate the senses into their writing.
Whether you’ve been writing for decades or you’ve only just started, this course will sharpen the instrument you work with every single day: your awareness.
Five days of immersive
writing instruction
Each day's lesson is focused and purposeful, drawing on the five senses as a writer's primary research tool. You'll learn how master writers use sensory attention to transform flat prose into writing that readers can feel.
Several hands-on
writing exercises
A few quick tasks per day, each exercise is designed to get you writing from direct experience rather than abstraction. These aren't prompts for the sake of prompts. Each one teaches a specific craft skill.
A new way of
moving through the world
By Day 5, you won't just be a better writer on the page. You'll notice more, absorb more and have more to say. That change doesn't disappear when the course ends.
A Certificate of
Completion
Submit your five completed exercises after Day 5 and receive your Writers' College certificate.
Reviews from Past Students
'I enjoyed the challenge of writing with precision while exploring tone and emotional texture in ways I hadn’t before. I also discovered the benefit of having a daily ritual to exercise my writing muscle, encourage my creativity to grow and deepen my relationship with words. I highly recommend this course for anyone seeking to reconnect with their craft, experiment with different styles or simply carve out time for reflection.' – Sophie Wong
‘An excellent experience. I couldn't wait for the next day and enjoyed every moment of it.’ – Magdalena Louw
‘The course material was fantastic – bite-sized chunks - wonderful additional reading. Very concise and informative. I learnt a lot.’ – Jane Weston
‘The course exceeded my expectations and provided the structure and motivation to keep writing. Fun, challenging, full of energy. Thank you for the journey.’ – Judy Port
Course outline
Over five lessons and exercises, you will work through these areas of craft:
Move beyond the obvious. Learn to observe what’s actually in front of you, not what you expect to find. Writing exercise: a scene rendered entirely through what the eye catches.
The world has a soundtrack many writers ignore. Discover how to use sound to create atmosphere and presence. Writing exercise: a place brought to life through what you hear.
Skin is the body’s largest sense organ and one of fiction’s most underused tools. Writing exercise: a moment defined by physical sensation.
This sense sits closest to memory and emotion, making it particularly powerful on the page. Writing exercise: a scene anchored by scent or taste.
Explore the power of taste and then integrate everything from the week into a piece of writing that locates the reader immediately and completely in a sensory world.
5-Day Awaken the Senses
Writing Intensive
NB: Once payment is made, the course will start and you will receive automated lessons via email for the next 14 days. In the unlikely event of a problem over our Xmas break, we won’t be able to help but we will rectify the issue when we return on 5 January 2026.
You can pay using a Credit Card or Debit Card.
You don’t need a Stripe account for this.
VERY IMPORTANT: After you have paid, you will be returned to our website. Please submit your name and email address so that we can capture your email address and start the first lesson.
This course is for you, if you want to...
- get unstuck and write from fresh perception rather than stale habit
- experience your subject matter in a new, more embodied way
- build a daily writing practice that is rooted in real observation
- produce prose that readers can see, hear, smell, touch and taste