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Courses >
Writing & Publishing > Creating a Sense of Place
 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.
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 Lori Wilde.
 Lori Wilde has published 49 romance novels with Harlequin, Time Warner, St. Martin's Press, and Harper Collins. Her novels have been translated into 17 languages and her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Quick and Simple magazines. She is a four-time nominee for Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award and she is a former finalist for the Romance Writers of America prestigious RITA award. Several of her books have appeared on the Waldenbooks bestseller list. Her novels have garnered accolades from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. She is a former registered nurse and for the last 10 years has made her living writing romance.
To purchase this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
Requirements:
Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).
Syllabus:
All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.
| Week One |
| Wednesday - Lesson 01 |
Observation and Data Collection
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| Friday - Lesson 02 |
Found Objects and Poetic Devices
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| Week Two |
| Wednesday - Lesson 03 |
The Natural World
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| Friday - Lesson 04 |
Gathering Oral Histories
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| Week Three |
| Wednesday - Lesson 05 |
People Watching and Creating Characters
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| Friday - Lesson 06 |
The Way Folks Talk
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| Week Four |
| Wednesday - Lesson 07 |
Place in Memoir
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| Friday - Lesson 08 |
Researching History and Culture
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| Week Five |
| Wednesday - Lesson 09 |
Foods—Oysters and Slumgullion
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| Friday - Lesson 10 |
Mapping Out Your Stories
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| Week Six |
| Wednesday - Lesson 11 |
Edit, Edit, Edit
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| Friday - Lesson 12 |
Offering Your Writing to Others
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To purchase this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
Student Reviews:
"Amazing class. Much valuable information, well reinforced. Examples were excellent and illustrative of the concepts being presented."
"I found this course to be very helpful. I learned a lot about place and setting and how to integrate it into my writing. I also liked that much of the focus was on creative writing, not just assignments for the sake of an assignment."
"I really enjoyed this course. I feel much more confident about my ability to be descriptive. Anyone interesting in learning how to create pictures with words should take this class."
"The instructor was very encouraging to all students and made suggestions to us on how to improve our writing skills. The class material was easy to follow and informative. The assignments were fun to do, and they made you utilize what you learned in the lessons. I enjoyed this class and feel like I learned a lot from it."
"This course has been very helpful to me, an aspiring writer who needed a jump start. I learned so much from this class. Now I have more confidence and feel ready to start my own writing projects. Thanks Liz for all of your wonderful comments and encouraging words."
"This course increased my self-confidence and improved the results of my writing."
"This course provided me with excellent information that I will be able to use now and far into the future. The instruction materials contained enough examples to help spur my thoughts into writings."
"This course was very informative and useful to get me started as a beginner writer."
"This was the best money I've ever spent."
"Lori Wilde is a wonderful instructor, patient and knowledgeable, a born teacher."
"Lori answered all of my questions, showed me how to improve my writing and encouraged me to continue writing my memoirs. She did the same for other students in the class. Good job."
"Lori is an excellent instructor. She gave helpful ways to improve my writing skills and encouragement when needed. I'm sorry the course has come to an end."
"I enjoyed this class and Lori, our instructor, was very helpful. She had great suggestions. I felt motivated to write."
"The assignments were interesting and the feedback was timely and insightful. Great class and a supportive, responsive instructor."
"I am a veteran of several online writing courses, and Ms. Wilde's is one that I would place at the top of my list of useful and challenging courses."
"Lori's class is a practical for any writer who needs to work on descriptive detail to help readers connect to their characters and story. I felt it gave me "what was missing" in my writing. Thanks so much."
To purchase this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
Recommended Courses:
Students who enrolled in Creating a Sense of Place were also interested in the following courses:
Beginning Writer's Workshop
Forensic Science for Writers
Research Methods for Writers
Romance Writing Secrets
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Writeriffic: Creativity Training for Writers
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