Nowadays, when people ask me what I write about, I say, food, sex, and God. And that just about sums it up. I think your characters find you in the same that your ideas find you. I think they settle on you. Start Writing Fiction focuses on a skill that is central to the writing of all stories, creating characters. Through the course, you’ll explore various ideas and take part in exercises to help you develop your own characters. You’ll start writing your own stories, learn to read like a writer, and how to edit.

You’ll hear from a number of successful authors, including Michele Roberts, Alex Garland, and Louis de Bernieres, as they talk about their own experiences of writing. There seem to be two different types of character. There’s the type that just turns up at your shoulder like a ghost and insists on being written. The other kind of character is the sort that you invent more or less from scratch or creator as a composite of various people that you’ve noticed or come across. You’ll see how established authors such as Toni Morrison, Graham Greene, and Kate Atkinson, have written and presented characters in their novels.

By the end of the course, you’ll have learned tricks, such as the importance of redrafting and using a journal to generate ideas. And, most important of all, you’ll start writing yourself.