Overview

Advanced Fiction: The Novel is made up of twelve lessons, including three opportunities for you to gain written feedback on your writing from the course tutors, as well as participating in peer discussion. The course also includes a variety of opportunities for you to try out a range of writing techniques and ideas.

The focus in this course is on supporting you through developing a fiction project. Each lesson provides detailed notes and ideas, writing exercises, prompts and advice for thinking about your own novel.

The course focuses, in particular, on the three key aspects of writing the novel: viewpoint & time, characterisation, and style. In this course, you are encouraged to think deeply about your writing. You will stretch and deepend your understanding of each of these aspects of fiction, learning more about the deep structures of language and story, and how to use this knowledge to enrich your work.

In viewpoint and time, we begin by revising the basics of viewpoint and tense before quickly moving on to an examination of the different implicit and explicit functions of narrative viewpoints. We look at the ways in which time is represented in fiction, how philosophical understandings of time and duration, evolution and change, impact on our expectations of narrative tense.

In character, we look at how we understand human nature: how psychological, neurological and textual notions of consciousness impact on our representations of being. Together, we explore notions of being and character, partly by thinking through the implications of characterless fiction, multi-vocal fictions, and communal versus individual notions of identity.

In style, we look at sentences and paragraphs, exploring the deep grammar of literary fiction, its attention to the shape and sound of language. Its attachment to a kind of poetics of prose. We explore experiments with style, the sleight of hand of realism, and the formal innovations of contemporary authors.

In the final weeks, we look at structural and close editing, exploring ways to move beyond early, exploratory drafts into satisfying, coherent works of fiction.

Course Structure

This course is comprised of 12 lessons.

Lesson One: I Don’t Know Art, but I know what I like

• Submission Deadline One (Proposal/sketch)

Lesson Two: First, plant your roses

Lesson Three: Where I’m Writing From: Viewpoint & Time, Part the first

Lesson Four: Where I’m Writing To: Viewpoint & Time, Part the second

Lesson Five: This Is Not My Beautiful Life: Character, Part the first

Lesson Six: This Is Not My Beautiful Wife: Character, Part the second

Lesson Seven: I Will Sing While You Croak: Style, part the first (quote from Henry Miller)

Lesson Eight: I Will Dance Over Your Dirty Corpse: Style, part the second

• Submission Deadline Two

Lesson Nine: You Are Here: Structure and story

Lesson Ten: Fruitless Pursuits: Ideas, big & small (quote from Einstein)

Lesson Eleven: Foundations of Humility: Structural Revision

Lesson Twelve: We Think In Generalitites; but we live in detail: Editing

• Submission Deadline Three

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 feedback opportunities during this course. These are opportunities for you to submit 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 Week Four

• Your first submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of a sketch or outline of your proposed writing project, and a draft opening of the opening pages/chapter for your fiction project, up to 5000 words

Writing Task Two: Due Week Eight

• Your second submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of a chapter or chapters from your work in progress. The submission can include a revised version of your initial pages and/or new words up to a total of 5000 words.

Writing Task Three: Due Week Twelve

• Your third submission for feedback and discussion with your peers will be a editorial notes and feedback on at least two of your peer’s Second Submission works. In return, you will receive at least two sets of editorial notes from your peers as well as editorial notes already provided by the tutor.

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 while developing your work for submission to agents or publishers.

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 sample course, or our introductory courses Playing with Prose or Playing With Poetry in order to familiarise yourself with Olvar Wood onLine (OWL).

All of the courses in OWL are based on our philosophy that writers thrive through a mixed diet of reading, writing and thinking. If you’ve never thought about your writing practice that way before, or you’d like to learn more about how to integrate your writing, reading and thinking, you might find our Chapter One course Reading for Writers useful for opening up your practice, exploring ideas around inspiration, writers block, how to ‘read like a writer’ and so on.

If you’ve never written fiction before, you might like to consider completing our more introductory Chapter Two course, Fiction, which explores techniques for researching and writing fiction across a range of genres.

Resources

In order to gain the most out of this course you will be asked to engage with a range of material, including works of fiction and poetry, critical theory and other secondary material. All of the required 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, including your submissions for feedback.

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