Writing From Life

Writing from Life

Next date: 28th February, 2012

One of the best routes into writing – both fiction and non-fiction – is through our personal experiences and memories; some of our most interesting material comes from our own lives. From getting ideas to structure, character, dialogue, description and voice, this course will help you to research and write about real life, whether memoir, biography, travel, reportage or fiction, and will explore ways of using that material to tell great stories that fully engage the reader.

Keeping it simple, keeping it friendly

Our online course is designed to be simple to fit into your life, simple to understand ... and very friendly.

Simple to fit into your life. Because the course is online, you can dip in and out whenever you want. As long as you have a few hours to spare each week, it doesn't matter what other commitments you have, or which times of day are most convenient for you.

Simple to understand. Our online course course environment is straightforward. If you can turn a computer on, your technical skills are probably fine. All our courses are hosted on our social networking site, The Word Cloud, so you can pop over right now to see how it feels.

Friendly. Our approach is highly interactive and supportive. You'll have your tutor to help you, but you'll also get loads of support and encouragement from your classmates.

Course Tutor

Your course tutor will be Helena Drysdale (left). Helena is a prize-winning author of five works of 'creative non-fiction. She is a course tutor for the Arvon Foundation and a Royal Literary Fellow teaching writing skills at Exeter University. She is also a well-known lecturer and broadcaster.

Bookings info

Duration: 6 week course

Next start date: 28th February, 2012

Fee: £295

Syllabus: See detailed info below

 Each week, you will get an introductory video, detailed lecture notes, a discussion topic, a homework assignment and feedback on that assignment. In addition, all class members are encouraged to chip in themselves. Ask questions that have been bothering you. Get into debates with your tutors and classmates. Offer each other feedback. Set challenges. Have fun!

How to book: See schedule and bookings info

More about our online courses: Click here

Any questions?: Ask away

Course Syllabus

Introduction. Before the course starts, you'll be able to watch an introductory video from the course tutor and get to know your fellow students in a dedicated area of the Word Cloud site.

Week 1. Toe in the water. We will look at getting started, finding a genre, and explore the creative sparks that fire you with ideas. What makes an idea a good one, and how can we best get that across? How do you write a blurb that summarizes your story and immediately excites a potential reader?

Week 2. Shape and figure. How do you organise your material? How do you shape a narrative? Where should you begin? Where will you end? There’s no point jumping in without some idea of where you’re going. We explore how to find the most arresting images, whether to move on chronologically, with flashbacks, thematically, or to jump about. We break down a daunting mass of material into chapters, and see how to keep the reader moving from one to the next.

Week 3. Getting under the skin. Whether fact or fiction, characters are what keep the reader intrigued. However good the plot of – say – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it’s Smiley himself we remember. If the main character is you, the narrator, we need to get to know you and care about you. How do you write about yourself without becoming too confessional, and how do you write about others and bring them alive on the page without them wanting to sue you?

Week 4. Your own voice. How can you best express your own voice, and how do others actually sound? Is the way you write true to you, and your individual voice? Dialogue is one of the best ways to create character and voice, and also to move the story along. We look in depth into making dialogue convincing, exploring direct and reported speech, and discuss the fine line between fact and fiction.

Week 5. Sensory responses. How do you bring alive landscapes, objects, memories, different times and places? We look at close observation of and sensory responses to the world around us and within ourselves. We also look at being creative with non-fiction, putting flesh on bones.

Week 6 It aint what you do, it’s the way that you do it... We explore ways of editing our own writing, cutting clichés, and perfecting our prose. However good your idea, the most important thing is the way that you tell it. Finally we kill off the gnomes that sit on our shoulders destroying our confidence and doing their best to hold us back. We also look at the publishing business, and how to move on with a finished manuscript.