gio’s WeBlog

Writers are a unique bunch, but as a writer, you already knew that. We know how to work independently, and we certainly know how to meet deadlines. We have to-whether we’re freelance or fiction writers-or we’ll lose our most valuable asset: our clients or our publishers.

Most writers wish to hone their skills, but it can be difficult to carve out time to go to classes at the local university or community college. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, online courses seem to have been designed with the writer in mind. Online classes are truly for the independent spirit and the dedicated student. However, online classes-just like classes in a traditional setting-have their pros and cons.

Before you sign up for an online class, ask yourself what you hope to gain from the course. Do you want to get advice on how to move your hopelessly stalled short story along, or do you want to learn the best way to market your business? Once you answer this question, you’ll have a much easier time comparing programs and choosing the one that is right for you.

Online courses are offered everywhere-from world-renown universities like UCLA to creative communities like Coffeehouse for Writers. You can earn undergraduate or graduate credit at some colleges and universities while other institutions and organizations might award you a certificate for completing the course.

Flash Orientation: The Ins and Outs of Online Courses

If you’ve never taken an online course then this section is for you. Let’s look at how the Fiction Course at a renowned writer’s college worked when I took a course there several years ago.

First things first. All the students of the course were given user names and IDs in order to access the school’s website. These were the keys to our virtual classroom that included individual email accounts, a public forum and a private forum. In our virtual classroom, we would exchange ideas, critique each other’s work, share our ideas, and ask questions.

Our first assignment was to do an online orientation to allow ourselves to become familiar with the system. We sent introduction emails to the webmaster and learned how to maneuver our way through the classroom. It doesn’t matter whether you are computer savvy; the system is as simple as following the basic instructions.

This was my first time working in a virtual classroom, and it was a strange experience at first. It is a very simple process. Our instructor put all of our assignments online. We then completed our assignments and posted them on the main board. Our instructor preferred that we each write "reviews" of the other’s work, and he also went through and made in-depth comments.

That’s all there is to it. Simple, isn’t it? Our instructor would post articles of interest for us to read, and we would do the same. The level of interaction was up to those in the class. That has its benefits but also its drawbacks as our class wasn’t very interactive except for the individual critiques.

My advice is before you sign up for an online class, find out if you can email the instructor to determine if her/his teaching beliefs mesh with yours. Unfortunately, my beliefs about writing, creativity, and inspiration did not fall inline with my instructor’s. As silly as it may sound, that made the class very difficult for me. My instructor was more of a straightforward, get-it-done kind of writer. While I agree with this on many levels, I also feel writing exercises, journaling, and reading inspirational books are an important part of my life as a writer.

You’ll also want to find out how much you’re actually expected to accomplish in the course. Ask the instructor this beforehand, if you can. By the end of the fiction class, we were supposed to have written a complete short story or the first full chapter of a novel. That was a novel concept at best for how the course was structured.

Rather than zip through the first draft of a story just to get the ideas and thoughts onto paper, we turned in a specific number of pages each week. Then we revised and revised until those pages were perfect. As a perfectionist anyway, I had a lot of trouble. I’d rather get my story out instead of spending weeks agonizing over the same pages.

It all really comes down to personal preference. Ensure you do your homework before you sign up for a class. Ask questions. You want to choose the right class, so you can get the most out of your valuable time and money.

Beth Williams is a full-time writer and published author with more than a decade of professional writing and editing experience. She has written hundreds of online and offline articles, ebooks, audio scripts, Web site reviews, Web content, newsletters, press releases, and more. To learn more or to hire Beth, please visit http://www.creativeinklings.org