How to Write a Novel
Writing the Draft
Have you created an outline and now feel prepared to start writing your novel? Or have you started a novel draft only to find your interest or confidence waning? In this course, the international best-selling authors and professors from The University of British Columbia’s renowned School of Creative Writing introduce the essential fiction craft toolbox for writers struggling with the common hurdles of first drafts.
While ideas and inspiration are often enough to ignite interest in writing a novel, writers can quickly lose confidence, especially when their best efforts have inadvertently produced flat characters, waning conflicts, tangled plots and weak dialogue. Reaching your goal of writing (and perhaps, publishing) a novel requires an understanding of fiction’s deeper mechanics and a familiarity with the specific craft elements that will help translate your creativity and imagination into compelling paragraphs, scenes and chapters.
Through writing exercises aimed at developing new skills, concrete examples from published novels, feedback and discussion with fellow writers and opportunities to identify and strengthen weaknesses in their own projects, learners will broaden their knowledge of fiction craft as they explore creating memorable characters, the art of scene design, tactics for managing unwieldy plots and steps for writing layered and meaningful dialogue.
Whether you’re beginning your novel draft or nearing the end, this course is a unique opportunity to learn the essentials of strong fiction writing from award-winning authors sharing their proven methods and approaches.
The course is recommended for professional and aspiring writers, writing groups, those participating in NaNoWriMo, teachers and anyone who has a novel in progress.
What you'll learn
- The elements of complex, dimensional characters
- How to craft believable dramatic dialogue
- Tactics for managing complicated plots
- The demands of high emotional stakes from scene level to story level
- Strategies for seeing your draft through to completion
- Introduction to the course.
- Ways to structure and organize your writing time.
- Point of view: from whose perspective will the reader experience the story? Each comes with its advantages and disadvantages.
- Types of prose and their uses.
- Voice: a strong, consistent stylistic quality that permeates your writing.
- Beginnings. The first sentence, first paragraph, and first page.
- Active and Passive Characters. How to give a character more agency.
- Character Complexity and Conflict. Internal, interpersonal and societal antagonisms help build complex and fully realized characters.
- Tension in Scene.
- Backstory and Flashbacks.
- What is the function of dialogue in fiction?
- How dialogue differs from everyday speech?
- What dialogue should never do.
- What are the hallmarks of great dialogue.
- How to work with subtext.
- Exploring the depths of your character: what is spoken, what is unspoken and what is unspeakable.
- How to format dialogue and work with dialogue tags.
- The evolving outline. What to do when you start to stray from your initial outline.
- Troubleshooting Structural Problems..
- Troubleshooting plot in five popular fiction genres (literary, speculative, crime, historical and romance).
- Endings. How to navigate through writing an effective ending.
- Why do research? What can research bring to different types of fiction writing?
- When to do research.
- What should you research?
- How do you best incorporate research?
- Case studies. Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Crime Fiction, and Socio-Political fiction.
- The ethics of research.
- Writing about yourself and your family.
- Blind Alleys. How to identify and back out of them.
- Procrastination and Hitting the Wall. Ways to combat these mental blocks
- Grappling with Theme.
- Dos and don'ts.
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Rating | Not enough ratings |
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Length | 6 weeks |
Effort | 4 - 6 hours per week |
Starts | On Demand (Start anytime) |
Cost | $295 |
From | University of British Columbia, UBCx via edX |
Instructors | Nancy Lee, Annabel Lyon |
Download Videos | On all desktop and mobile devices |
Language | English |
Subjects | Humanities Art & Design |
Tags | Art & Culture Humanities Literature |
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Rating | Not enough ratings |
---|---|
Length | 6 weeks |
Effort | 4 - 6 hours per week |
Starts | On Demand (Start anytime) |
Cost | $295 |
From | University of British Columbia, UBCx via edX |
Instructors | Nancy Lee, Annabel Lyon |
Download Videos | On all desktop and mobile devices |
Language | English |
Subjects | Humanities Art & Design |
Tags | Art & Culture Humanities Literature |
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