• You're serious about finishing this book. This is the one, the project that asks you to make it. You know exactly which book it is that comes to mind when you read those words and it is just that one book that you are looking to dedicate yourself to really being with right now.
   

• Your manuscript is very much underway. You have the shape of it, or the feel of it - a clarity of its essence perhaps - carried within you. There are many words already written (even if they are yet to hang together in a structure right for your readers!) You know what you're writing towards, the idea of what this book will be is pulling you through.

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• You understand that to have this manuscript finished and in your hands, you are going to need to let go of what you think it should be, and let it be what it needs to be. You're ready for the grief that might come from that as the idea that has lived in your imagination transforms into a living, breathing, tangible work on the page. 
   

• You have a baseline level of confidence in your skills as a writer and storyteller. We're here to soundboard with and collaborate on ideas—to help you get yourself to the next stage, and the next stage, in your writing of this book—but we will not actively teach you how to develop voice or give in-depth lessons on how to structure a novel. Though we may discuss these things lightly in sessions together if they form a part of helping your process, this is not the focus of the work we do with authors here at the Centre for Novels in Progress.

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