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Wesleyan University

Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description

Wesleyan University via Coursera

Overview

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In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to the techniques that masters of fiction use to ground a story in a concrete world. From the most realist settings to the most fantastical, writers will learn how to describe the physical world in sharp, sensory detail. We will also learn how to build credibility through research, and to use creative meditation exercises to deepen our own understanding of our story worlds, so that our readers can see all that we imagine.

Syllabus

  • Persuasive Settings: Why Description Matters
    • Writing a great short story is like conveying a dream. As we will see from studying one famous master, a "persuasive" setting is necessary in order to build mood, character, and even plot.
  • If You Build It, They Will Come
    • Pack your fiction with "vitamin-rich" detail. Looking at the work of both masters and students, we will discuss how funny, meaningful, and powerful details can be.
  • Credibility and Research
    • Create settings both familiar and unfamiliar to you, while avoiding common missteps. You will be guided through several meditation exercises as you practice "imaginative research".
  • Realities
    • Setting and description works in realist and non-realist fiction, as well as across literary genres. Consider how to write about your own "primal landscape".

Taught by

Amity Gaige

Reviews

3.6 rating, based on 12 Class Central reviews

4.7 rating at Coursera based on 1337 ratings

Start your review of Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description

  • Cyn Gar
    Very disappointed. The examples of contemporary literature used as illustration are, to use the vernacular, total snore-fests . What has happened to the craft of writing? Incomplete and run-on sentences are fine for dialogue and poetry, not prose, yet this class uses example after example of this shoddy style that ultimately comes across as being full of itself.
    If you want to learn how to write well, take a different set of classes.
  • It's not really a free class, but class-central listed it as a free course when I searched for this subject matter. I didn't know until a week into it, that I would have had to pay almost $400 US dollars to get a decent level of access. Without that…
  • Pj Harrison
    All I can say is I tried. I really did. I didn't find anything in the class I couldn't find much better expressed by various published writers for free and in classes offered by Writer Associations such as RWA or others from free to 10 or 20 dollars to members.
  • Zoe Aukim
    The instructor Amity Gaige was very professional and interesting. Taking writing instruction from a published author gives one confidence that they know what they are talking about. It's a shame the writing exercises are only available for peer review if you are paying for the course but it doesn't stop you from working on them yourself just without the option for getting feedback.
  • Abigail Peterson
    The responses and results are certainly not free, but the content itself is good. I am going to work through it and have one of my contemporaries give me feedback instead of paying for the feedback.
  • Profile image for Tyler Snoek
    Tyler Snoek
    This course didn't feel as useful as the previous courses in this series. The week on research was the most informative for me which is very much worth the effort. I must admit though that I only watched the video's in the syllabus and didn't actually sign up and pay for it. Getting some peer reviews, which I have done for other courses which was almost always highly disappointing, didn't seem to be worth that amount of money.
  • Brandi Day
  • Regina

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