All About Love

allaboutlove offers a range of online romantic fiction courses. We provide everything from foundation writing skills to advanced support while you write a complete novel.

All our modules are intended to take between two and five hours a week to complete, depending how many of the optional exercises you choose to do. In this way, we hope our courses will suit any schedule and all lifestyles. Our basic and advanced courses are interactive, providing students with a constant flow of feedback and advice. We promise to tell the truth, but we’ll always be kind.  Module One of The Guide to Writing Romance is entirely free. Why not try it today?

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Your Facilitators

We are Richard Beynon and Jo-Anne Richards. We believe that we bring to this labour of love many years of our own tears, sweat, success – and of course, failures and rejections.

We’d like to share these, and hope that some of you may then avoid the mistakes that we inevitably made, and learn the good skills that we’ve developed the hard way.

Each of us brings our different skills. I (Jo-Anne) bring everything I’ve managed to learn (miraculously, and some of it by pure chance) while writing four internationally published novels (and a few short stories). Richard brings his skills in dialogue, building character, writing good scenes and maintaining suspense, gleaned during an award-winning career in scripts and screen-plays. We’ve also shamelessly picked the brains of many of our writerly friends.

Richard and I have been training – at university level and to civilians – for years and we run a Writer’s Circle for creative writers. I’ll add some of the comments we’ve received for our literary workshops below. 

All our courses are interactive. We will offer feedback and the opportunity to mix online with us and other participants. Here’s some of the more formal information you may want to know about us:

Jo-Anne Richards is an internationally published writer, who has just brought out her fourth novel, My Brother’s Book. She teaches writing skills at post-graduate level and supervises Masters students in Creative Writing.

Her first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken and her second, Touching the Lighthouse, were published by Headline Review, London, and, in German translation, by Knaur. Innocence was chosen as a Dillon’s Debut in Britain, to be showcased as an “outstanding first novel” by the well-known book chain. It was short-listed for the The M-Net Book Prize, and nominated for the Impac International Dublin Literary Award.

Her third book, Sad at the Edges was published by Stephan Phillips. My Brother’s Book launched in April 2008, published by Picador Africa. She has published short stories in five collections.

Richard Beynon is a television and film writer. A former journalist, he has conceived, shaped and written scores of documentaries.

He managed the writing team of the popular soap, Isidingo, for three years, as well as contributing over three hundred scripts to the series.

He has won numerous awards for his work, specifically in comedy, soap and children’s drama. He is currently a writer and generator of stories on a new daily drama, Rhythm City. He has lectured on writing for film and television to film students at university level.

They received invaluable help in researching and developing the lesbian romance course from Hila Bouzaglou and Ann Smith.

Ann Smith, a lecturer in English literature for 22 years is now an independent Educational Consultant and Trainer. She develops and writes educational material for Maskew Miller Longman, Pearson Education, Heinemann and Macmillan. She edits manuscripts for different publishers. 
She co-authored Methodologies for Mapping a Southern African Girlhood in the Age of Aids, which is in press. Ann teaches Literary Theory as a part-time lecturer at various universities and supervises post graduate students. She regularly offers courses at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 

She has presented many papers at local and international conferences, and has published widely in the areas of literature, Literary Theory (with particular focus on Feminism and Gender, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Postcolonialism), Cultural Studies and Pedagogy.

Testimonials from participants of past writing courses:

The facilitators were just great together. They complemented one another beautifully, and gave a perfect mix of hard (though always constructive) criticism, and encouragement. Jo-Anne and Richard are nothing short of inspirational. But also so down-to-earth and approachable. – Tara, media specialist and trainer.

Thank you for opening doors for me. I have walked away from the workshop with an open heart and a willingness to take risks . . . Thank you for your gentle creative spirit. – Warren, actor and lecturer in dramatic arts.

The nice thing about working with Richard and Jo-Anne is that they never impose their own voice on you, even in a subtle way. Working with them, you always get the feeling that they are trying to help you uncover your own voice, your way of telling the story and understanding the characters. They seem to weigh their suggestions very carefully against your vision and against where you want the story to go. I can only imagine that this comes from their own unique understanding of the position of the writer, and their sensitivity towards that. They are great teachers, and I have benefited immeasurably from their advice which is always practical, and always constructive. - Jackie, journalist.

The course allowed me to release the long pent-up flow of creative writing that has been gummed up, for some years, with academic convention and footnoting imperatives. Incidentally, my academic writing has benefited too from this detox treatment. – Cynthia, senior lecturer in history.