The Art of Creative Writing: Practice, Character & Scene

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to build a regular writing practice, make meaningful progress even when time is limited, organize your ideas, and develop your craft in a way that fits your goals. Writer Rumaan Alam shares a simple four-step process for developing a writing practice that feels both productive and rewarding. Whether you’re writing for the first time, working through writer’s block, or revising your fifth draft, this course is designed for anyone who wants to make writing a more consistent part of their life. You’ll use practical exercises to take the pressure off, create a roadmap for your projects, and find an approach to writing that works for you and your genre. To be successful in this course, you don’t need a background in creative writing—just an interest in writing and a willingness to experiment. What makes this course unique is Rumaan’s personal, practical approach, including a look inside his Brooklyn home and at his own manuscript as he moves from outlining through revision.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to use description intentionally to create vivid, immersive scenes; incorporate sensory detail and unexpected elements to spark creativity; and identify descriptions that feel automatic, overused, or unnecessary. Acclaimed writer Kathy Fish demystifies the art of description with concrete examples, practical advice, and tools you can return to again and again. Across three parts, you’ll explore how description can do more than provide window dressing: it can create a “felt experience” that pulls readers into your work. You’ll learn how to make thoughtful choices about what to describe, use the senses and the unexpected to create fresh imagery, and study notable examples from published writing to understand why certain descriptions work. This course is for writers of all levels who want to sharpen their descriptive powers and bring greater energy and depth to their work. No formal creative writing background is required; to be successful, you should have an interest in creative writing and a willingness to experiment with language. You’ll leave with practical tools for creating richly described, immersive scenes in stories of any form or length.