Overview

Crime Writing is comprised of twelve lessons and three opportunities for you to gain written feedback on your writing from the course tutors, as well as participating in peer-based critique and discussion. The course also includes various opportunities for you to try out a range of writing techniques and ideas.

From the day you enrol, you have up to six months to complete the course. We recommend spending at least one week on each lesson.

Taught by Dr Inga Simpson, this course introduces you to the genre of crime fiction, and the process for planning and writing a crime novel. Each lesson includes a range of readings featuring different styles and sub-genres, a discussion of the techniques used by a range of writers, and opportunities for you to experiment with your own writing.

Crime Writing begins with an exploration of the history and many sub-genres of crime fiction. We’ll learn how to research and develop ideas into short stories or novel-length works and explore different structural and narrative techniques; ways of telling your story. We’ll consider character; creating your detective figure, as well as minor characters, criminals, and developing character arcs. Crime Writing examines the importance of setting in crime fiction and ways of constructing three-dimensional landscapes. We’ll learn how to write powerful scenes, including action scenes, as well as convincing dialogue.

Crime Writing then takes a closer look at writing short crime fiction, spy novels and thrillers, and the perks and perils of true crime.

The course also examines the importance of point of view, and techniques for pining it down. In the final lesson, we’ll experiment with description and style, the craft of writing on a sentence-by-sentence level, and finding your own unique voice.

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 online courses Playing with Prose or check out the free online Book Club 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 The Writing Life 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 also like to consider our Chapter Two course, Fiction, which explores the basics of writing prose fiction across a range of genres.

Content

This course is comprised of 6 lessons, each of which should take you about a week to complete.

1. Genre and subgenre
2. Research and developing ideas
3. Plot and structure: finding the problem and solving it
4. Character: detectives, villains and arcs
   
   1. First writing task due
5. Setting: more than just a backdrop
6. Scenes and action
7. Dialogue: talking the talk
8. Short crime fiction
   
   1. Second writing task due
9. True crime
10. Thrillers and spy fiction
11. Point of view
12. Description and style: finding your own voice
    
    1. Final writing task due

Feedback

There are three opportunities for you to submit 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: Due Lesson Four

• Your submission for feedback and discussion with your peers should be a first chapter and synopsis for your crime novel of up to 5000 words.

Writing Task: Due Lesson Eight

• Your second submission for feedback and discussion with your peers should consist of one or more short crime stories, up to a total of 5000 words.

Writing Task: Due Lesson Twelve

• Your final submission for feedback and discussion with your peers, again up to 5000 words, which can include a revised earlier submission or a new crime story or chapter.

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, both fiction and non-fiction. 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.

About Learning Online

It’s a good idea, if you’ve never used an online learning facility before, to check out our free courses before you sign up for Crime Writing. Trying out one of our intoductory courses (such as Playing with Prose) will give you an opportunity to see what our online courses look and feel like, and how most of the interaction works. Or you might like to join our free online Book Club to get a feel for how OWL works.

OWL’s online courses work by inviting you to engage with your tutor, and with other writers enrolled in the course through a range of interfaces, including chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, and standard, content-based webpages.

Throughout the site, you’ll find there is instant help available – usually indicated by a , which you can click to get more information. If you still can’t work out what to do, simply post a message in the ‘help!’ forum, or email your tutors.

Although the course is run online, we also ask you to work offline on your writing, using old-fashioned techniques like writing in a journal, stretching your imagination and reading, reading, reading.

To get the most out of this course, we recommend you set aside at least four hours for each lesson/week:

• One hour to read the online lesson material;
• One hour to think and dream and mess about with ideas;
• One hour for trying out the various writing techniques each lesson includes;
• One hour for posting your writing, providing feedback or commentary on other writer’s work, participating in discussion forums and chats, and so on.

We recommend that you allocate a bit of extra time the first week to familiarise yourself with the online learning forum.