Work with Scarlett

Who are you?

You need to know more about storytelling. You’re ambitious and busy and don’t necessarily want to spend years finding out things someone on the inside could tell you in an hour. (Although there is pleasure in that too!) I don’t know for sure, but if you’re like other people I’ve coached you’re highly successful in an adjacent or even quite different industry from writing. I’ve worked with people from finance, business, law, acting, art, the music industry and TV.

You don’t want to do a creative writing MA or an Arvon course. You don’t need a community for now, and you don’t have time to read other people’s work every week anyway. You just want to know, as soon as possible, what it takes to write a great story.

Maybe you work in one of the other creative industries and want to get better at using storytelling in your pitch decks, presentations or the positioning of your artists or their work. You want to properly understand the creative hook, ticking clock, jeopardy, inciting incident, midpoint and the most killer aspects of excellent stories.

You probably sense that there is something mysterious and fundamental about storytelling for humans and you want the space to uncover ancient wisdom and secrets without Claude or ChatGPT getting involved.

Perhaps you’ve spent the last 20 years as a detective or a stand-up comedian or a pharmacist and you want to know how to craft a story set in your precise world.

Or possibly it’s not even about you. Maybe you know someone else who is serious about their writing (or even my writing) and you’d like to give them the gift of an in-person creative conversation with me. Let me know if this is a gift and I’ll bring a signed copy of the recipient’s favourite book of mine to the meeting.

I offer both online coaching and in-person creative conversations, for you, one of your team, or as a gift for someone else.

My online one-to-ones are 60 minutes long, and take place on Google Meet. Before our session I’ll prompt you to tell me what you want to do with our time. In the session itself we will immediately get to work on the most important storytelling goals you have. I will directly help you with key techniques and give you some of the inside info that it took me 30 years to learn. You can book as many sessions as you like. I am currently offering five sessions for the price of four.

My creative conversations are 90 minutes long, and take place over a pot of tea or a coffee in my private members’ club in central London. We will be surrounded by the buzz of other people talking about their professional creative projects. Some will be writers meeting agents or publishers for the first time. Some will be pitching to TV producers. It’s a great environment for you to practice your own pitch, or for us to work out together what it would be. If you want to experience the live charge of a writer’s life, while fixing your own creative problems or following your unique curiosity, this is the session for you.

Who am I?

I am Scarlett Thomas - Peculiar Gonzo Genius! I’ve been publishing books with major houses around the world for almost 30 years. I am Honorary Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Honorary means I technically don’t work there any more, but I do still have a library card. And my freedom. I taught creative writing and consulted in higher education for 25 years, and now I want to share what I learned with you.

I began life as a secret love child on a council estate in Barking. From this inauspicious beginning I made my own career as a professional writer, living entirely from words I have put on a page. I have worked mainly as a novelist, pitching my ideas to editors and working closely with teams at Hodder & Stoughton, HarperCollins, Canongate and Simon & Schuster and many other publishers around the world. I have also had success in the incredibly competitive world of TV screenwriting.

Although I have written ‘commercial’ fiction, my biggest successes have been my most risky, literary, experimental work. I understand from within how the publishing industry works, and can answer all your questions like ‘Do I need an agent?’ and ‘How do I write my first page?’

It is so much more like a campfire than you think.

Three lines that I have written have made me more money than most of the others put together.

Find out more by booking a session with me using the buttons below.