Creative Writing: Write, Polish, Submit!

This course will enhance your editing skills to know what to look out for when improving your creative writing. You’ll be introduced to typical elements of story to look out for at the macro level of plot coherence, placement of exposition, pacing or dropped plots. In addition, you’ll be taught what to focus on at the sentence level: to rid text of unnecessary adverbs, redundancies and cliches. There is writing time in class to start a piece or work on one already written.

To inspire your editor’s mind, you’ll read annotated stories where an editor explains what isn’t working. This course will also keep you updated of calls for submissions and give you guidance on how to prepare a long-form piece of work for submission, such as the query letter and synopsis. Learners will be encouraged to submit two versions of a short piece of writing – one original and one edited where editing choices will be explained. The course also offers feedback – verbal feedback from peers during the class and on the platform as well as written feedback from the tutor.

It is expected that learners will have written pieces they want to polish upon joining the class.