Line Edit Boot Camp w/ Leone Ross

Saturday & Sunday, Oct 10-11^th, 2026

1-5pm UK via Zoom

Award winning writer, editor and educator for more than three decades, course leader Leone Ross offers a weekend like no other – the bootcamp where we edit the hell out of our sentences.  After decades working in publishing, universities, competition judging and as a fiction writer herself, Leone knows one of the MAIN REASONS that gatekeepers reject manuscripts – and it’s NOT because your ideas aren’t fabulous. It’s because you need to grab a grammar book. It’s the wordy sentences, the redundancy, the cliches, the writing that tries too hard, the writing that doesn’t feel like YOU, because you’re so anxious to sound WRITERLY.

The Line Edit Bootcamp makes sentences work.

Full of accessible, practical tips, mini-lectures, group work and individual exercises, this is the Course that takes your writing to that next level. You can expect to leave with a clear understanding of the editorial process, how to efficiently line edit yourself, and how to assess your word choices. This is granular, exacting work with the potential to change your writing practice forever.

This course is designed to help experienced fiction writers and beginners at all levels, although do be aware that participants are asked to apply with 500-650 words of their own fiction writing.

“Leone is incredible. I couldn’t have got my novel to where it is now,

without her..” 

- novelist Nikesh Shukla

Course Outline:

Day 1

Bad Sentence Day - Defining the edit process; the difference between macro and micro editing; the five flavours of wordiness; purple prose; improving causality

Day 2

Making Sentences Beautiful -- Cliché; Specificity and detail; directness; grammar hierarchy; parallelism; collocation; economy

All activity takes place on Zoom. The course is open to writers all over the world. The Course goes across one weekend, four hours each day, including comfort breaks.

“This was the best gift I gave myself this year.”

-       Dzifa Job

Ticket Costs:

General Admission: £220.

You can pay in 2 instalments: a non-refundable deposit of £60 to secure your place, and the remaining balance due by Oct 7th at noon UK.

If you are a member of Leone's mailing list, the discounted fee is £180. You should have received a discount code from Leone that you can apply on either GA or Deposit tickets, at check out.

Please note that all tickets are non-refundable.

When registering for this course you will be asked to complete a short form, and provide 500-650 words of fiction writing (as recent as possible!) This helps Leone to tailor the course to your writing needs.

About the Facilitator:

Leone Ross FRSL is a novelist, short story writer, editor and educator. Her third novel, This One Sky Day, was nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize, among others — and named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her first short-story collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, prompted the Times Literary Supplement to call her ‘a pointilliste, a master of detail...’. In 2021, she won the Manchester Prize for Fiction for a single short story. Ross has facilitated writer’s voices for 35+ years, as editor and creative writing tutor up to PhD level. She has taught variously for Cardiff University, Roehampton University, Goldsmiths University, The City Literary Institute, the Faber Academy and the Arvon Foundation and judged the Mslexia Prize, the Bridport Prize and the VS Pritchett Prize for Fiction. Ross is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Higher Education Academy. She is the editor of Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022.