Overview

Historical Fiction is a twelve-week course, comprised of twelve lessons and 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 techniques and ideas.

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

This course is delivered over twelve lessons. 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 covers a range of approaches to writing historical fiction, beginning with some ideas about research and some of the challenges in writing story, character and setting that are particular to the genre, and moving on to a consideration of the four main sub-genres of historical fiction, from documentary fiction to metafiction.

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 introductory courses Playing with Prose or Playing With Poetry, 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 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.

Content

This course is comprised of 12 lessons.

1. Introduction
2. Research
3. Story and Structure
4. Character
5. Writing Task One
6. Setting
7. Documentary Fiction
8. Realism
9. Revisionist Historical Fiction
10. Writing Task Two
11. Metahistorical Fiction
12. Historiographic Metafiction
13. Editing
14. The Marketplace
15. Writing Task Three

Feedback

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.

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.

About Learning Online

It’s a good idea, if you’ve never used an online learning facility before, to check out our free Book Club before you sign up for Biographical Writing. Trying out one of our free courses will give you an opportunity to see what our online courses look and feel like, and how most of the interaction 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:

1. one hour to read the online lesson material;
2. one hour to think and dream and mess about with ideas;
3. one hour for trying out the various writing techniques each lesson includes;
4. 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.