OpenLearn: Start Writing Fiction

Just a quick post to tell you about the excellent Start Writing Fiction course (A174_1) at OpenLearn, the free branch of the Open University.

I signed up and subscribed to the course ages ago and then forgot to go back and actually do it. Until last weekend, and it’s a good thing I remembered! I’m using the course to help me plan my novel, and doing the exercises has led to a few Eureka! moments.

I highly recommend the course.

Start Writing Fiction at Open University

I do a lot of online research at work, and sometimes that leads to discovering cool writing links. The one I found the other day is too good to keep it to myself.

Open University offers a variety of learning material for free now, and there is a unit called
start writing fiction. Now I am a little past the start writing fiction stage, but I will give this class a go anyway.

In my experience, you can learn a lot from other people’s mistakes, especially if you make the same mistakes yourself. For some reason, I find it much easier to find bad writing in my own texts when I found something similar in another writer’s text first.

Secondly, this seems to be a good place to find other writers who really want to improve their writing skills. For me, talking about writing with like-minded people works like a charm for my creative output.

So, who else will give start writing fiction a try?