I'm now exactly 5 weeks into my 10 week course, Fiction Writing I, at Gotham in NY. At the rate of exchange when I paid for it the cost was about A$410.00, a reasonable amount compared with anything from A$1200.00 upwards as the cost of one subject for a local university course. Gotham co-ordinates its courses from New York but I have classmates in Canada, Switzerland, and at one point Germany, although most of my 12 colleagues are from different parts of the U.S. It's been quite an intense and challenging experience and I'm learning the basic things that anyone wanting to keep control of a story's structure needs to know. And it has definitely helped me understand why sometimes my writing heads off in some unmanageable direction which I can then no longer steer back into shape. The weekly structure is straightforward. There's an online set of notes e.g. Plot, Point of View, Description etc, and a weekly exercise of a few hundred words to practise that particular virtue of good writing. There's also a weekly ongoing discussion which class-mates contribute to on that topic, although we can meander off a bit as we did two weeks ago when our classmate in Germany despatched a Hissy Email announcing he was pulling out of the course as we were not worthy of his attendance there. Who knew a cyberclass could be so melodramatic? He seemed to have come to it with decided views about what was and was not the purpose of the course and had a tendency to lambast everyone's submitted work without mercy. My story he thought was nauseatingly written; he directed the same ferocity to everyone else's submission. That was tremendously bonding for those of us among the maimed and injured. He hadn't had time to rip into everyone's, so those he had, the chosen, felt a special connection. But his presence brooded over everything we expressed online, and one became aware, even in the discussions he declined to participate in, that he was probably there reading and condemning. Of course he departed before we had a chance to assess the quality of his own work. Once he left a lot of issues relating to his style of critiquing came up (naturally)in the following week's chat. The chats take place for about an hour, usually on Monday nights NY time (about lunchtime Tuesday for me, so it's been difficult to take time out when I'm at work.) My only reservation about doing this course has been the lack of the vernacular for me. I find myself thinking I should substitute a word for 'chook', but of course don't want to when for us using a different word would sound artificial. (Shrimps on the barbie anyone?) There are many ways in which Australians use English which we don't share with our American cousins. As a counterpoint I've enrolled in a Sydney-based online writing course starting in March, at the Writers Studio. As a former external law student at QUT I already know I like the online classroom very much. I can get up in the middle of the night and log in to get my work done, or write assessments of other people's work when it suits me to (another interesting and useful part of the Gotham style of teaching) . And I don't have to haul my sorry carcass to yet another falling-apart lecture room. I also think, especially if the criticism is a bit fierce as happened to some of us, it's quite good to be able to escape the scrutiny of others while adjusting to it. For me this exercise is purely a self-managed process, and I'm not aiming to get some kind of qualification, just to be as good a writer as I can be. Frankly I'd recommend the Gotham course I'm doing to anyone similarly interested in getting a bit more guidance with the technical skills of writing a good story, regards Barbara
PS some of us at Queensland Writing are planning to get together soon and actually speak! That will be a novelty for us. If you're interested let me know - email, comment etc
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