Allaboutwriting

Allaboutwriting Online Creative Writing Course stimulates creativity and allows each writer to find their own individual voice. The course provides writers with a range of skills and techniques to translate their vision into publishable manuscripts.

The ten modules are designed to be done one per week but you are free to work at your own pace. Each module will cover writing dos and don’ts and includes at least one exercise. You will receive personal feedback from Richard and Jo-Anne.

The course is open to both those with an interest in writing or with a proposed writing project, even if it’s only the sketchiest idea at this stage. It will serve editors, writers of fiction, non-fiction or even screenplays.The skills cover everything from finding a voice to plotting a piece of writing from beginning to end.

The Benefits of our Course:

Start when it suits you, work at your own pace.

Learn the skills to write both fiction and non-fiction.

Writing practice in every module.

Full feedback on assignments in every module.

We promise to be honest, but kind.

Enjoy on-going support in our online writers’ group.

We have an association with three publishers: Pan Macmillan, Penguin and Jacana, who will give particular consideration to manuscripts we recommend.

What our students say:
I found Allaboutwriting’s writing course expansive in style, educative in content and entertaining in delivery. Jo-Anne and Richard present a full gamut of learning and insight on creative writing seemingly effortlessly, with the welcome addition of real verve and wit. It was pure pleasure to participate. Tim Cohen, journalist.

I could feel my confidence blooming and it showed in the writing, so I’m hoping that I’ll take that with me into my next novel. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the whole course – wish I’d discovered it years ago!! The feedback has been so practical, constructive and helpful that I’ve seen immediately where I was losing my way. Judy Croome, novelist.

Course Description

Finding your voice – This module gives you the techniques to fight self-consciousness. How to use skills such as free-writing and personal myth-making to develop a unique style and voice. Learn the skills to avoid self-judgment and to write with flair.

How journaling can help your writing. This is your private space to write without censure. How to use it to develop a writer’s consciousness. How to view the world like a writer, developing the writer’s particular quality of observance. How to translate that observance into text, practising finding the words to express the experience of the senses.

Ideas – where the come from and how to develop them – How to form your initial ideas. We examine where writers have looked for their ideas. Where do they start – with characters, stories or settings?

Develop them creatively, using skills such as brainstorming, index cards and story-boarding. How to develop your personal brainstorming skills, whether you have access to other people or are doing it alone.

What is the story? – No matter how “plot- or character-driven”, every narrative will contain certain elements that we expect of a story. If an element is fudged or, in experimental writing, implied or left out altogether, it needs to be done artfully and for effect, in order to achieve something.

This is equally true for fiction and non-fiction. The successful creative non-fiction writer should be equally concerned with the elements of narrative, constructing a plot through careful selection of the material available to him.

Elbert Hubbard said that life was just one damned thing after another. This is not what we want in a story (nor, in fact, is it the ideal way of looking at life). Every story must have an arc that draws us through it.

Point of view – Literary point of view is far more complex in effect than was ever suggested by the grammatical treatment of POV we were taught in school.

The decision you make on point of view is a crucial one. Change point of view and it will fundamentally alter the nature of your work. This module deals, in great detail, with the ways in which different literary POVs have been used, with many examples.

All points of view have advantages and drawbacks. But even some of those drawbacks can be used to your advantage. We look at these advantages and disadvantages in all their complexity.

We show how POV can assist you in fiction and creative non-fiction. We look at changes to approach and how our reactions to different POVs have changed over the past decades. We show the difference between changing perspectives and points of view. We deal with successful POV switching, unreliable narrators, and some more experimental uses of POV.

Building characters (real or fictional) – Characters are the most important part of any narrative. If they don’t hold us, if we don’t find them compelling, we won’t be drawn into their story.

Characters drive plot. The story should flow out of who they are and how they react. As readers, we should believe the story exists only because of the people – the way they act, and how they react to events around them.

How do they act and react to what is said and done around them? It should make sense to us in psychological terms.

In this module, we encourage you to look at what forms people; what makes them tick. Then we transfer that knowledge to the development of characters that stand out from the page. We show you how to build compelling, psychologically believable people who will drive readers to discover how they drive the story forward and what happens to them.

Beginnings and Middles – Once you have developed your characters and worked out the elements of your story, you are ready to begin. But where should that be?

This module looks at the importance of the first line, the first page and the first chapter (or equivalent). What are the jobs they should do? How best can they draw readers in and feed them just enough to keep them reading.

Then we look at the book’s basic structure. How can it most successfully be told? Is it best told chronologically, or by starting in the middle, or just before the final climax. We take a look at some of the basics of keeping a story moving through the middle. How to avoid the dreaded sag, how to vary your pacing and avoid exposition.

Writing in Scenes - This module deals with the greatly under-rated, hugely important building block of any narrative: the scene.

This is an important skill for the writers of fiction and non-fiction. When people talk of creative non-fiction having borrowed from the skills of fiction, this is the most important of them.

What do we mean by “writing in scenes”, and how do we do it? The scene is the most basic element of “showing” rather than “telling”. It eliminates the distance between your reader and the action. It drops readers into the middle of the action – to experience and interpret it for themselves.

If your story is a castle, its scenes are the bricks you will use to construct it.

Suspense - The word “suspense” tends to make us think of plot-driven thrillers. But our definition is wide. We like to see it as anything that draws the reader forward. This is as relevant for non-fiction writers as for novelists.

In this Module, we look at the ways in which you can create an appetite for events yet to be described – a tension between the present moment, and the anticipated moment.

There is no story without some form of conflict. It’s the essential ingredient that keeps us reading. Something is at stake, and the equilibrium is disturbed. In life, we long for equilibrium (unless we’re a war correspondent). But in stories, when equilibrium is achieved, the story ends.

People often misunderstand the concept of literary conflict – seeing it only as a battle or a fight. In this module, with extensive examples, we look at the elements of literary conflict, and what can create it.

Showing not telling – This module presents a central truth about good writing: it is almost always better to show your story and your characters, than to tell us about them.

When you tell your readers something, you’re explaining it to them. When you show your readers, you allow them to see, hear, taste or smell it. From this, your engaged and active readers make their own deductions about the people and events you’ve shown them.

In this module, we analyse exactly what we mean by “showing”. And we look at the different ways in which we can achieve it. With extensive examples, we look at ways of showing your carefully developed characters, without having to explain them. We look at how their setting tells us not just about their world, but the kind of people they are.

We look at detail … in detail. Every detail has a job to do, whether it exists for textural reasons, or to show us more about characters or situations.

Dialogue and wrap-up - A story can succeed or fail on its dialogue. Badly done, it is actively off-putting. Well done, it can take a mediocre story to another level.

We look at the uses of dialogue and how to use it well. Dialogue is not speech as it is used in real-life. It is the appearance of real speech. How do you achieve this?

We use the tricks of great script-writers to create dialogue that leaps off the page.

Cost: US$725 ZAR 5000.

Contact Trish at trishurquhart@gmail.com for more information.

Who we are:
Allaboutwriting is a partnership between novelist Jo-Anne Richards and screen-writer, Richard Beynon. Jo-Anne is the author of four novels, including the best-selling The Innocence of Roast Chicken (Headline UK) and, most recently, My Brother’s Book (Picador Africa). Richard is an award-winning screen and television writer, responsible for hundreds of scripts in the genres of drama, soap and comedy.

To read about the pros and cons of online versus face-to-face courses click here.