About This Course

You may live among the prickly pears, dust devils, and intense sun of the desert. Or you may reside in a small town nestled alongside cornfields. Or perhaps you live in the big city and take a train in to work every day.

No matter where you live, your surroundings have special physical, historical, and spiritual characteristics that you can--and should--rely on to breathe life into any work of fiction or nonfiction.

During this course, you'll learn to tap into the world you know in order to establish a realistic sense of place in your writing. You'll develop your eye for detail, and you'll find out how to collect the information you'll need to infuse your works with believable characters, memorable settings, and detailed descriptions.

This hands-on course is filled with a variety of valuable exercises that will help you hone your skills of observation, interviewing, collecting oral histories, remembering details and descriptions, reproducing dialogue and diction, using figurative language, developing realistic characters, and more.

By the time you finish this course, you'll be well-prepared to create truly unique works filled with vivid and meaningful observations of the people, places, foods, customs, and events in not only your local community, but also in places that exist only in your memory.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Eva Shaw. Eva Shaw, Ph.D. is a full-time working writer of 1000 articles, essays and short stories. She’s the ghost or author of 70 books including: Ghostwriting for Fun & Profit, Writeriffic: Creativity Training for Writers, Write Your Book in 20 Minutes (a DVD), Shovel It: Nature’s Health Plan, What to Do When a Loved One Dies, The Successful Writer’s Guide to Publishing Magazine Articles, Writing the Nonfiction Book, Insider’s Guide to San Diego, The Sun Never Sets, and more. Eva's work has been featured in USA Today, San Diego Union Tribune, Shape, Woman’s World, Country Living, Costco Connection, Publisher’s Weekly, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and others. She has won several awards, including the Book of the Year Award from the American Journal of Nursing, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Woman of Merit Award. An expert on time management for writers, Eva stays on top of market trends to sell her own work and to help emerging writers focus on quality writing and publication.