Online Courses

There are so many resources out there that it is hard to know where to start. Finding a course, or book, or even software that actually helps you write (rather than helps you procrastinate writing) is tough. But I have found a few that I really liked and felt like were helpful.

The very first stop for me, as is probably quite common, was NaNoWriMo. Write your 50k words in 30 days and you are a winner! With a novel! Well, sort of. Still those words have become manuscripts that are becoming novels, and short stories so all those Author Pep Talks and late night reaches of word count goals did help.  And the forums there pointed me in the right direction to find even more help.

Even having ‘won’ NaNo a couple times, feeling like I could reliably finish things (of any length) was still a mystery. I stumbled onto Holly Lisle's site (https://hollyswritingclasses.com) and onto her free flash fiction course. In just a few weeks I had 8 shorts that just kept multiplying and became my first self-published collections. Her forums are great and everyone on them is so helpful. It is a great writers community.

I wasn't in a place to be able to purchase her bigger courses so i kept poking around. I had been on Coursera.org for other things and found a neat set of courses presented by Wesleyan University (https://www.coursera.org/specializations/creative-writing). I’ll admit I found some of the lecturers more engaging than others but the prompts were interesting and helpful all around.

The most surprising, and the most fun, course I’ve done was also in Coursera, it is a screenwriting course (https://www.coursera.org/learn/script-writing/). It teaches the format for screenplays but also the 3 act structure and great dialog. The best part of this one though was that it was a close group for peer review. It was required to review others work and to get feedback on your own, even with the completely free version! I got some amazing notes on my story and learned a lot about the process by reading others first drafts.

If you are searching for knowledge I definitely recommend checking out some of these places, I don't get anything for posting the links so I have no reason to over-sell them. What are your favorite online (or print) resources? Drop links in the comments, I love to keep learning!