Overview

Fiction is made up of twelve lessons, including three opportunities for you to gain written feedback on your writing from the course tutors, and participate in peer discussion. The course also includes various opportunities for you to try out a range of writing styles and techniques.

Taught by Nike Bourke and Inga Simpson, this course focuses on writing fiction, including both the short story and the novel. Each lesson includes an essay, a discussion of techniques used by a variety of writers, and opportunities for you to experiment with your own writing.

Fiction begins with an introduction to this broad genre, its history, forms and various genres. We’ll experiment with different structural and narrative techniques; ways of telling your story. The course explores creating memorable characters and establishing point of view. You will learn how to write powerful scenes and convincing dialogue.

Fiction also examines the importance of setting and ways of constructing three-dimensional landscapes. We’ll experiment with description and style, the craft of writing on a sentence-by-sentence level, and finding your own unique voice.

Fiction then takes a closer look at the craft of writing short stories and the genres of literary fiction, speculative fiction, crime fiction, and children’s fiction.

In the final lesson, we explore the challenges in writing a novel or novella length work.

Prerequisites

You don't need to have any prior experience or knowledge to enrol in this course, although you may find it helpful to have a play around in our free Sampler course, or in one of introductory online courses Playing with Prose or Playing With Poetry in order to familiarise yourself with Olvar Wood onLine (OWL).

Content

This course is comprised of 12 lessons.

1. Introduction to fiction
2. Plot, structure and story
3. Character and point of view
4. Scenes and dialogue
5. Setting and description
6. Voice and style
   • First Task Due
7. Short story
8. Literary fiction
9. Speculative fiction
10. Crime fiction
11. Children’s fiction
12. The novel
    • Second writing task due

Feedback

There are several opportunities in each lesson for you to submit your writing for informal feedback from both other writers in the course, and the course tutors. Feedback from the course tutors on your posts to forums and so on will not be in-depth, but will be personal and timely. You will not receive feedback on all of your posts or comments in the course, though you can expect to receive frequent, personal comments most of the time.

There are three formal feedback opportunities during this course. These are opportunities for you to submit considered pieces of your own writing for feedback both from your peers in the course, and from the course mentor. This feedback will be in the form of written notes and will be focused on helping you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your writing, and on ways to move your writing forward. Feedback may include, where appropriate and relevant, advice about further reading, strategies for improving the work, potential markets for publication, etc.

Writing Task One: Due Lesson Six

• Your first submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of one or more short stories in any genre up to a total of 5000 words.

Writing Task Two: Due Lesson Twelve

• Your second submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of a short story up to 5000 words in a genre other than that of your first submission.

There is no marks-based assessment in this course. This is partly because we believe that a focus on grades – on getting a good-enough grade, on writing something to please your teacher or peers – can block you from exploring your writing in an open, exploratory and experimental way. It can get you all tied up in knots worrying about grades, when what you could be focused on is the experience of learning something new, taking risks, and having fun.

Resources

In order to gain the most out of this course you will be asked to engage with a range of reading material. All of the readings for this course are available through the online interface as downloadable PDFs, word documents or webpages.

The course tutors will also encourage you to read material outside the set readings, and will recommend works or authors in response to your interactions in the course.

How To Enrol

You can enrol in any course on OWL by going to the website, and clicking on the course title. You'll be guided through the process of creating a user profile and paying for your course (via Paypal).

If you'd prefer to have your user profile created for you (you can edit it later), and pay by either direct deposit or cheque, please contact us by email at admin@olvarwood.com.au