Start Writing Fiction

The content looked like it would be OK to good, but I departed from this course after the second week for two reasons:

First, I found it to be beginner, a much lower level than I had expected.

It is geared toward encouraging the inner artist (keep a journal; notice the telling detail and record it; try to stick to a schedule; just do it! etc.). I had (incorrectly) anticipated instruction on how to create good beginnings (the "starts") for my works of fiction ("Start Writing Fiction" meant "Initiate a Work of Fiction Well" to me), but this course only offers (vague) instruction on how to begin a writing career ("Start Writing Fiction" means "Initiate the Act of Being an Author of Fiction" to them). My mistake ...

Second, I found the discussion platform prohibitively disorganized.

There are too many participants, not enough sorting out among all of us, and yet total dependence on this un-sorted mish-mash as the primary means of instruction and interaction. The web-pages of discussion offer only one page for each assignment or lecture topic. Onto this page ALL two-thousand-plus enrolled students will post one-paragraph-long responses. The responses might be useful suggestions, or other students' submitted assignments, or responses to your own submissions, or answers to question prompts, or any of a number of other stupid or smart thoughts. The responses appear one after another, seldom responding in any meaningful manner to the statements immediately before or after them. It's open-mike night at a Narcissists' convention -- each speaker arrives, grabs the microphone, says his or her pet saying, and departs, having been actively encouraged to ignore everyone else. Some good students try to seek one another out, and try to interact a bit more, so it depends on dumb luck as to whether you get a decent answer to a question, or a decent response to a submission. The discussion board has almost no search-find capability, only minimal (and hard to discern) indication of sub-threading, no function to start a new thread, no option to entitle or format comments, no tracking in order to return to certain topics or discussions except the simple "follow a person" toggle. Most of the rather simple, typical functions of nearly all competent internet bulletin boards are lacking from this discussion board. It's just, "put everybody's comments here one after another in the order they were typed and make a big list of them." I found that I could only skim what portions of the commentary happened to be at the top of the page whenever I happened to log in. Even then, if I did find something I liked or wanted to stick with, I still couldn't figure out how to involve myself in those discussions since they were rapidly eclipsed for me by newcomer statements, and therefore were eclipsed for anyone else viewing the page as well, thus preventing both sides of the conversation from finding out what was said next in their conversation. It's like trying to watch television while sitting on the remote control's "channel switch" button. The channel continuously changes no matter what you're trying to watch, on and on, most frustrating! It's a single-thread discussion with two thousand other people and no means of sorting out the conversations to which I might wish to pay heed. The technology exists (cf. "php bulletin board" duh!) for easy improvement. What's more, the main -- nay, ONLY -- method of feedback on student submissions comes via this discussion board. That makes the television-remote metaphor even worse, for it's like trying to hold a telephone conversation with a channel, while sitting on the remote and constantly switching channels, such that no matter what you're trying to watch, it continuously changes, and yet you and it were trying to respond to one another! Not just frustrating, but, to me, irresponsibly incompetent. Consequently, though I suspect that good instruction could have been had through this course, I could not find it, hidden as it was behind thousands of unsorted unrelated serial contributions. Monologues in silos, needle in haystack. Glad I didn't pay money for it.

I dis-enrolled. I wouldn't want to take another course that was distributed on the same discussion platform unless the provider first significantly changed the board to more adequately allow for stringed, ongoing, mutual interactions among students. The php-bulletin-board software is free, and out there, already.

I registered with Futurelearn on the suggestion from my wife. I've been writing for many years and thought a lightly-structured course like this might help to get back to basics.

What I've found is a course that sets people up to be limited in their writing outlook. For an 8 week course it still focuses on character creation right into its 6th week. The 7th and 8th being washy ideas on how to collaborate and give feedback to other writers.

At the outset I saw the benefit of a discussion forum style approach but quickly understood that most people (including myself) where just shouting into null space as most people dont bother to provide feedback.

It feels like this course lacks any real form of curricula at all.

I wouldn't suggest that anyone looking to be a writer, unless you want to punch out a Mills & Boon romance that over emphasises character descriptions.

Am I ever glad I'm not paying for this course.