All course content including tutorials, exercises, tasks, and reading lists, is uploaded to the course platform on the same day each week.

Each week, you’ll be set a task to be completed by the following week. Your tutors and peers will then give you feedback on your writing.

Each course has 12 students that engage in discussion and peer-feedback every week. Students tend to form strong and lasting bonds, which means the exchange of ideas, friendship and support lasts beyond the course itself.

Once you’re enrolled, you’ll have full access to all that content permanently. So there’s plenty of time to fit the course around your everyday life.

Finding that first spark of inspiration for a short story can be a difficult process, but there are definitely tricks to making it happen. We’ll look at some of the ways you can go out and find great ideas, instead of simply waiting for them to strike. We’ll also look at how to develop your own, unique creative voice. What kind of writer do you want to be? And how can you really sound like yourself on the page?

Outcome: You’ll learn some techniques and exercises to help find that initial idea for your short story. You’ll also work on how to develop a literary voice that really feels like your own.

Writing great characters is often the key to getting your readers emotionally involved with your fiction. Whether your characters are kind-hearted, relatable, supernatural or villainous, it’s an invaluable skill to be able to build characters your readers will fall in love with – preferably from the first page! This tutorial will focus on how to do exactly that, and of course on how to create characters you’ll love to write about, too!

Outcome: You’ll learn techniques for building character, and use these to develop the characters for your short story.

Great stories are structured in all sorts of different and various ways, but every great story has a shape to it, as well as a sense of tightness and coherence. We’ll look at some of the different ways you might want to structure and plot out your story, with a particular focus on where to start telling it, and how to find the perfect place at which to stop.

Outcome: You’ll be introduced to some of the many possible different ways to structure a short story, and you’ll refine the plot and structure of your own short story.

When should you set your creativity free, and when should you edit your work? How should you best go about editing, when it’s the right time to be doing it? This tutorial will focus on how to get that first draft written, and how to nail the process of refining it. We’ll look at how to make sure your story is really communicating what you want it to, and how to polish it up to a shine by sharpening details and building in moments of specificity and sense of place.

Outcome:
You’ll get that last boost you need to finish a full first draft of your story, and then you’ll learn some fail-safe ways to perfect it.