5-week Online Short Course: Building a Survive and Thrive Toolkit: For Neurodiverse Writers

Taught by Rachel Sambrooks.

Course Overview:

This course is designed for neurodiverse writers (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) who want to understand their own individual writing process and develop practical strategies for creativity and approaching publication.

You’ll build a personalised “Survive and Thrive” toolkit to help you navigate common challenges in writing and the professional side of being a writer. Through guided tasks, prompts and shared discussion, you’ll explore what helps, what hinders, and what supports you in your creative process and in everyday life.

This course will cover keeping on going, using what you love to fuel your work, navigating social networking, managing sensory challenges, and shaping a writing life that works for you.

Course structure:

Week 1: To identify our own ways of working and barriers – you are unique! Spiky profiles. Very light introductions and building confidence. Five ways to wellbeing for writers.

Week 2: Finding strategies to acknowledge and overcome RSD and stress that blocks us from our writing. Prompts and bodydoubling.

Week 3: What to do when you have to operate in social situations. Scenarios and sentence starters. Sensory kits.

Week 4: Making a success book and sharing what does work for us. Writing about our writing journeys.

Week 5: Consolidating the Toolkit. Looking to the future – what’s changed in your approach?

Tutor bio:

Rachel Sambrooks is a writer with late diagnosed ADHD. Having a lifetime of learning strategies for her own writing as well as teaching creative writing to adults, young people and ESOL students it was only recently she discovered how her unusual approaches to her writing were informed by her own neurodiversity. Additionally being a parent/carer for a child with DLD has meant she has spent the last twenty years expanding her understanding of neurodiversity.

Rachel was runner up in the CWIP prize 2025 and is now represented by an agent and on submission to publishers with her debut novel. She is published in anthologies with her short story and poetry and has a poetry pamphlet ‘Harpy’ published by Palewell Press.

Who is this course suitable for?

This course is suitable for neurodiverse writers (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) at any stage of their journey – just starting out, returning to writing, or working towards publication.

Details:

The sessions will take place online via Zoom Online Meeting software. It is free to download and you will only need the free version to attend. Please download it and check it is working before the course.

Your Zoom link will be sent out in your confirmation email.

Please try and be somewhere you can concentrate and won’t be interrupted. Headphones can be useful if you have some, to cut out other noise.

Bursary Scheme 2026:

We understand that not all writers are able to pay for their writing courses to further their career, and we run a Bursary Scheme as a consequence. If you feel you need a bursary, please contact us: info@writingwestmidlands.org.

Please note: you must sign up for the full course even if you cannot attend all dates. No partial course ticket is available.

Short Courses are for over 18s. If you are a young writer, you can sign up for our Spark Young Writers Programme.

All Writing West Midlands short courses are collaborative, and you will learn as much from your fellow course attendees as from the tutor. You will be expected to play an active role in group tasks, and you will also have time to reflect on your own writing during sessions.

If you have any additional needs, please contact Writing West Midlands in advance of the course starting and we will try to assist you.