Advanced Fiction (The Novel)
(Novel)
Course OverviewAdvanced 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.