Course Detail

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.