PLEASE NOTE: The Institute will be closing at 5:00pm (GMT) on Thursday 23 December 2021 and re-opening on 9.00am (GMT) Tuesday 4 January 2022. During this time our academic and professional services teams will be unavailable. If you book onto an online course that begins on 3 January 2022 after the 23 December, you will receive your Welcome Email on 3 January, the course start date. This email will include your username, password, and instructions on how to access the Virtual Learning Environment.
Aims of the course
- To give writers the opportunity to push their own creative boundaries in a structured way in a supportive environment
- To help writers of all genres of fiction for whom the 'Introduction to...' courses may be less appropriate
- To provide a community of writers with whom students can collaborate, co-operate and provide mutual support and peer review
Target audience
- Writers past the Introductory course stage
- Writers keen to upskill, to re-energise, refresh or re-engage with their craft
- Writers seeking an online community of writers with whom to engage and collaborate
Course content overview
Each week has a theme which relates to an area of literary production which writers can tap as a resource for their own writing. Tutor videos will encourage students to explore the theme through structured reading, discussion and writing prompts. Students will be encouraged from the beginning to engage with classmates through small study groups (membership will be rotated by the tutor so each student gets to work within a variety of groupings) in some of the exercises. There will be a wide range of writing exercises offered each week – students are completely free to engage with as many or as few as they wish, and are only required to self-select one of their own pieces of writing each week to post in the ‘Gallery’ forum. The tutor will respond to this piece. This is to encourage students to try a variety of approaches with no pressure and decide themselves which piece arrives at the most successful outcome, and which would most benefit from feedback. It also enables students with minimum time available to complete only one exercise a week if they wish, whereas those with more time/energy/motivation will have a rich array of opportunities to explore their creativity.
Teaching week 1: Inspiration - what fiction writers can learn from non-fiction
Learning outcomes:
- To expand awareness of the resources available to participants - both in the world outside and around them, and in their own personal 'compost heap' (their own unique experience of everything they've experienced, felt, read, watched, etc)
- To encourage participants to look for inspiration everywhere and to view inspiration as coming from within, in their own unique response (their soul's 'answering echo' as Ray Bradbury puts it) to stimulus.
Teaching week 2: Poetic license - what fiction writers can learn from poetry
Learning outcomes:
- To appreciate what a small amount of material a poem can start from, and hence any piece of writing
- To learn from the concision and compression poets use and to appreciate the precision of language as they deploy it
- To take any fear out of approaching poetry and to encourage students to see it as an arm of literary production related to their own practise and available to them both as a resource and as a means of expression
- To understand the porous nature of the boundary between poetry and fiction (particularly flash fiction)
Teaching week 3: Spoken words - what fiction writers can learn from script writing
Learning outcomes:
- To appreciate how writing for performance has influenced the writing of fiction
- To understand what we can learn from writing from performance about the role of images in storytelling
- To learn from playwrights and screenwriters about effective dialogue, both in character building and plot advancement
Teaching week 4: The art of persuasion - what fiction writers can learn from political rhetoric
Learning outcomes:
- To alert participants to language as a persuasive mechanism, as a tool for affecting perception
- To equip students with rhetorical skills
Teaching week 5: Multi-tasking - how writers combine aspects of writing to produce effective, efficient and economical prose
Learning outcomes:
- To develop an understanding of how the most successful writing is almost always doing more than one 'job'
- to develop the ability to combine a number of functions in one scene
Schedule (this course is completed entirely online)
Orientation Week: 3-9 January 2022
Teaching Weeks: 10 January-13 February 2022
Feedback Week: 14-20 February 2022
Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours reading material, etc., although this will vary from person to person.
While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material).
Virtual Learning Environment
Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place through a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (discussion boards etc).
Certificate of participation
A Certificate of Participation will be awarded to participants who contribute constructively to weekly discussions and exercises/assignments for the duration of the course.
