Writing fiction: a sense of place

How do you evoke a sense of place in fiction, making your readers feel as though they really inhabit the spaces you create? This course will explore ways of engaging with your fictional environments – from the intimate and domestic to the epic landscape – to make location work for your story.

All fiction depends – often to a very considerable extent – on the writer’s ability to situate characters and action in a convincingly realised location. By focusing closely on this crucial aspect of the writer’s craft, we shall enhance our understanding of it, and strengthen our writing more generally.

Learning outcomes:

1. A fuller understanding of the importance of location in fiction;
2. A greater confidence in both the practice of fiction-writing and the practice of critical analysis.

Session titles:

1. The importance of place
2. Real places (memory and research)
3. Imagined places
4. Place and viewpoint
5. Urban spaces/the natural environment

Writing exercises
A writing exercise will be set on each day of the course, and will be explained in the pre-recorded material.

All course content will be delivered online via the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). You will be taught largely through a series of pre-recorded talks (which may be audio and/or video), designed to help you address different aspects of the main topic. You will normally have access to a range of useful resources and suggested activities.

There will also be an element of interactive work, and the opportunity for you to engage in written form with other course participants and discuss questions set by the Course Director via the Course Forum. The Course Director will generally respond to a selection of key questions and comments on a daily basis.

There are no pre-requisites for courses, unless specified, and all are open to adult learners over 18 years old. Courses are taught at approximately first-year undergraduate level.

Content will be made available on each day of the course, Monday to Friday, from 8.00am BST. Course content will normally amount to c 1.5hrs per day across the 5 days, comprising of material delivered by the Course Director and activities/reading set, which would include discussions via the course forum. You may also need to complete reading or other preparation suggested in advance of the course.  (Please see below.)

We therefore suggest that you set aside approximately 1.5 hours of study per day to complete each day’s content and activities. However, this does not need to be done in one sitting, and you have the flexibility to access content when and where you want, and to go back and review it as often as you wish. Each course runs for one week and content will remain available to access on the VLE for 2 weeks after the course has finished.

A Certificate of Participation for the course(s) will be sent electronically, upon request via email, after the end of the Summer Festival. Details will be provided on the VLE.

Notes specific to this Creative Writing course

Welcome to your creative writing course, part of the Summer Festival of Learning organised by Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education.

You will be taught largely through a series of pre-recorded talks, designed to help you address different aspects of the main topic. There will also be an element of interactive work: you may, if you wish, put forward questions to be answered by the tutor. These questions will be in written form and sent to the tutor via the Virtual Learning Environment [VLE]; they will be answered, also in written form, on a daily basis. Both questions and answers will be visible to all members of the course.

Questions should normally be related to the day’s teaching and the associated daily writing exercise. Please note that it will not be possible to provide text-specific feedback on the work you produce in response to the exercise assignment, though questions arising from the assignment will be welcome. Please note too that, depending on the number of questions, your tutor may have to work selectively. Where this applies, selection will tend to favour questions of general interest to the group as a whole.

The first day's talk will be introductory, and thereafter a typical session might run as follows:

• the tutor will give a broad account of the territory to be covered in the session
• the tutor will offer close analysis of relevant published texts or images. These will be posted on the VLE in advance of the course
• the tutor will set a writing exercise based on the session's focal concerns, giving you guidelines and making you aware of key issues
• the tutor will summarise the session's concerns and give a brief outline of the next day's focus

We look forward to working with you during the period of the course.