All course content including tutorials, exercises, tasks, and reading lists, is uploaded to the course platform on the same day each week.

Each week, you’ll be set a task to be completed by the following week. Your tutors and peers will then give you feedback on your writing.

Each course has 12 students that engage in discussion and peer-feedback every week. Students tend to form strong and lasting bonds, which means the exchange of ideas, friendship and support lasts beyond the course itself.

Once you’re enrolled, you’ll have full access to all that content permanently. So there’s plenty of time to fit the course around your everyday life.

We’ll begin to find a way into our writing and make sure we aren’t daunted by that blank first page. We’ll look at ways to test our concepts and make sure we know where they’re heading, looking closely at a few other writers and ways they can give us useful models.

Outcome: You’ll make the vital first steps to working out where you’re heading – and how to get there.

Who will read your book and why? We’ll discuss different audiences and different ways to reach them – and why it’s okay if you just want to write for yourself.

Outcome: You’ll have a clearer idea of who you are writing for and why – and how to pitch it to them.

We’ll find out how to spin a really good yarn because good storytelling is as important in non-fiction as fiction.

Outcome: You’ll have ideas about when to show, when to tell and how to do both. You’ll also learn good journalistic techniques for passing on facts quickly – and making those facts interesting.

Just as in fiction, dialogue and drama are crucial to many forms of non-fiction – and the rules are very similar. We’ll study those rules – and when to break them. We’ll also look at how to carry out and use your research.

Outcome: You’ll have techniques to produce really effective dialogue, gripping drama, and to harness your research.

How do you bring alive landscapes, objects, memories, different times and places? We’ll look at close observation of and sensory responses to the world around us and within ourselves.

Outcome: You’ll discover new ways of being creative with non-fiction, putting flesh on bare bones and when your own imagination can help you tell your story.

We’ll assess our work and achievements over the past six weeks – and also to think about how to take things even further.

Outcome: You’ll learn about the fine art of editing and redrafting, how to keep going when the going gets tough and what do when you get to the end. You’ll also get ideas about how best to pitch your work and put together a professional submission pack.