Developing Your Prose Fiction with Ian Nettleton (ten-week course)

Week one – Creating compelling characters

A good story needs conflict and a character who is morally complex. In the first session, we will look at how to develop our characters so that they are compelling to our readers. We will then experiment with placing a created character into a unique situation to decipher their quirks, faults, and flaws.

Week two – Drawing the reader in

Looking at some published examples, we will discuss beginnings and how to create a story that will draw the reader in from the very start. Remembering that the first page is the reader’s way into the tale, we will explore ways to balance getting the story underway with establishing the world and characters of your story.

Week three – Point of View

From moral tone and mood to the language you choose, we’ll look at how essential it is to use your character’s perspective deliberately. We’ll explore both common points of view as well as thinking about John Gardner’s psychic distance – a more ‘fluid’ use of point of view. We will then complete a short writing exercise to explore the effect point of view has on our own stories.

Week four – Short fiction vs the novel

What are the differences between the short story and the novel, and what do they have in common? In this session, we will look at the classic plotline and the classic novel outline, and start to think about how these vary across short stories and long-form fiction.

Week five – Creating dramatic scenes

Every scene should add to the overall story and every scene should work as a dramatic unit. We’ll explore how you can heighten the drama so that every scene has its own vital energy, and we will start to think about ways we can bring drama to the page in our own stories.

Week six – Genre

Why does genre matter? It is key to think about the fiction market when writing your stories, as this can drastically change your readership. In this session, we will look at the opportunities writing in different genres can offer the writer, and how important it is to understand reader expectations of the genre you are writing in.

Week seven – The world of your story

This week, we will look at how to create a plausible story world, and how this experience will differ depending on whether the genre is fantasy or urban realism. We will then use this discussion in our workshopping, and start to look at the settings of our own stories.

Week eight – Editing

Is every line necessary? This week we will focus on the importance of editing, and we will be going through individual words and lines in our stories to test out whether they are the right fit for what we are trying to present to our readers.

Week nine – Dramatising exposition

In this session, we will return to our earlier work on creating drama and conflict in your fiction. We will start to experiment with sharing facts with your readers ‘invisibly’ to create more drama in your story, and explore how to ‘show, don’t tell’.

Week ten – The Big Workshop

In this final session, each participant will share their story with the group and receive immediate feedback from their peers. We will also look at ways to get our work out there in the world, and the other opportunities available to develop your writing further.

This intermediate course is suitable for writers who have attended a beginners or introductory writing class in the past or have similar experience. You will probably be writing in your own time on a regular or semi-regular basis and are likely to have finished several shorter pieces of fiction. This course will delve deeper into the technical elements of writing fiction and give you the confidence to start using these techniques creatively. You will also build your experience in workshopping yours and others’ work.

This course takes place over ten weeks and is a natural follow-on to the introductory course in writing. Each week you will be given material that illustrates the points we cover and be asked to work on your own writing as the weeks progress, with half of the first hour given over to readings of this writing in small groups. You will also be given short stories to read, ready for discussion the following week. From week six everyone will get the chance to workshop 500 words. During the last session, everyone will be given the opportunity to read out a piece of their writing for general comments and by the end of the course you will be encouraged to produce a complete short story or the first 2000 words of a novel.

Course materials and notes for each week will be accessible 24/7 during the course, and for one year after the end of the course.