Right, having gotten the personal dynamics out of the way in the last post, I will now go into the practical aspects of the writing courses (Oxford), and I have to say, the Fiction Writing course was the most useful of the two completed so far.
Each course is ten weeks long, and each week focuses on a different subject. You can see all the subjects on their continuing education website so I won’t repeat them here. In each week there is recommended reading; explanations about whatever aspect of fiction writing we are focusing on for that week. There are exercises to complete and student forums where we can comment on each other’s work. There are a number of forums, each exercise having a dedicated one on which to post our work, and where we can give feedback on that week’s exercises.
We also had a personal blog where we were expected to post our ideas for further stories and exercises and were given an online, week-by-week manual to read and print out.
Both courses have two marked and moderated assignments and we are invited to leave feedback about the course at the end.
The manual was clearly set out and the exercises we needed to do were easy to understand. Everything was explained well. We were given enough information to know what we were expected to write and the entire course felt ‘full’ and well-rounded. There was a sense of commitment, and interest, from the tutor which helped everyone feel supported and which allowed us to grow in confidence. It was a good group.
There were quite a few group activities, where we were asked to collaborate in order to construct a plot. This was fascinating and challenging. Fascinating because there were writers of different genres, and challenging for the same reason. One genre was chosen, involving vampires and werewolves, (I haven’t read vampire books since Anne Rice back in the 80s) and we each had to construct the next part of the story. Obviously, not all students’ writing could be selected, but everyone was given feedback, until the story had been written. By the end of the exercise, I realised that you could write about anything, so long as you were familiar with the genre. The exercise also covered character arcs and plot points so all the time we were writing we were learning, and all through one exercise. There were a couple of these exercises and others where we had to construct a story about a character, from a painting.
Some other aspects of novel-writing that we covered were: dialogue, structure, character, plot, descriptive language, how to cut wordage, etc. All useful, practical stuff.
By the end of the course, I could easily identify which areas of writing I was weakest in, and which ones I was stronger in, which helped me improve my previous writing.
Once I’d finished the Fiction writing course, I wanted to go on and do more. There was an advanced creative course but I felt that doing the beginner’s one, because the advanced one, following on from that, would be more sensible. I didn’t have to; I could have gone on without it, but I wanted to go step-by-step.
In hindsight, I should have done the advanced without it, but in a way, I’m glad I didn’t because I learned something I hadn’t intended to learn.
The Creative Writing course followed the same format as the first, except for the online blog, and the fact that you couldn’t download the course. But you could print it off.
From the very start of this course, I struggled. Expectations were not clearly set out, and I ended up asking for clarification too many times. There was not enough information so I had to wing it most of the time, all the while asking myself, ‘Is this what he wants?’ It soon became obvious that other students were also misinterpreting his instructions as they all did the same as I did.
Annoyingly, after we had completed the exercise, he then told us what he’d expected us to do. Too late! I needed to hear that in the beginning. Nothing was clear to me and I felt like I had taken a backward step. I also felt stupid, which is a clear sign to me of a power play. I trained as a counsellor, and what I felt from the tutor was that he liked to keep his cards (knowledge) close to his chest. He only gave as much information as he needed to, because he needed to be in control. This made the course very difficult. I wondered how anyone could grow, as he liked to keep everyone at a certain level. I’ve had teachers like that before. They have a need to be The Teacher. I wondered if this was why he taught the beginner’s course, rather than the advanced one?
Again, there were weekly exercises, far fewer than the fiction-writing course, comprehension, POV, character, etc. The last week’s session was about editing, but it seemed completely pointless: a couple of exercises where we separated writing into paragraphs and read a couple of famous authors’ edits.
There were a couple of modules with so few exercises that everyone had submitted them within two days, instead of the week it should have taken to do them.
What I’d hoped to learn in this course, was not what I was learning so I ended up distancing myself. However, this distancing served an unexpected purpose. It allowed me to pull back from being too excited and to look rationally at what I was writing. In some ways, this felt stifling but in others, it made me think more. But again, I had to be careful, because I came out feeling like a lousy writer instead of feeling even a smidge capable. If I had done this course first, I may never have done another one (other students on this course enjoyed it and found it helpful), so I had to remind myself that I did well in the first one, therefore I wasn’t a complete failure.
Unfortunately, you can only learn by doing, and even if I did not get what I needed in the second course, I learned other things, although I would have preferred not to have spent £500 for the pleasure!