6 Free Online Writing Courses You Can Start Today

Endless Story Ideas

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for three days.

There are three elements that a story needs: a character, a setting, and a conflict.

In this course, you'll learn about each of these elements, and how they fit together into a story plot.

You'll learn how to come up with ideas for characters, settings, and conflicts, and how to develop those into story ideas!

What you'll learn:

• the essential elements of a story
• how to come up with story ideas whenever you need them

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.

Suspense Techniques

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for two days.

By building suspense into your stories, you can make them more exciting and harder to put down.

You can create suspense just by developing a character readers care about and putting that character in trouble.

Other ways of creating suspense:

• Slowing down a scene at dramatic moments.
• Foreshadowing, when you hint at what's coming.
• Raising questions in the reader's mind and delaying the answers.
• Cliffhangers, where you end a chapter or a scene at crucial points... and the reader has to wait or turn the page to find out what happens.
• Dramatic irony, where the reader knows something the character doesn't... so the reader waits for the other shoe to drop.

What you'll learn:

• How to build suspense into your stories through character development, narrative point of view, and description.
• How to control pacing to increase tension.
• How to strategically delay information to build curiosity.

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.

Beginnings, Middles, Endings

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for three days.

The beginning of your story is where you capture reader's attention and make them decide to keep reading.

The middle of your story is where you develop your plot. It can be challenging to maintain energy and momentum throughout the middle of a story, but this course will show you how!

The ending of your story needs to seal readers' satisfaction with your story. A great ending will leave readers thinking and maybe talking about your story long after they've finished reading.

What you'll learn:

• What to put in the beginning, middle, and end of your story.
• How to pull readers into your story and keep their interest through the middle.
• How to write an ending that leaves readers satisfied.

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.

Intro to Character Development

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for two days.

If readers care about your characters, they'll care about your story.

The key is to create interesting, three-dimensional characters, and then make readers feel like they actually know them.

Readers can get to know your characters the same way we get to know people in real life; based on:

• what they do.
• what they say and how they say it.
• how other people react to them.
• their habits, clothing, homes, possessions, et cetera.

If you're writing the story from a particular character's point of view, you can also show that character's thoughts.

What you'll learn:

• How to develop characters.
• Tricks for making your characters more interesting.
• How to use "showing" instead of "telling" to bring your characters to life.

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.

Intro to Mystery Writing

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for two days.

Most mystery novels are about someone trying to solve a crime; i.e., they're trying to find out who did it.

The person trying to solve the crime might be a professional sleuth such as a police detective, or an amateur sleuth -- for example, a small-town librarian who discovers a dead body in the stacks and decides to find out whodunit!

A mystery can be a kind of puzzle or game where the reader "competes" against the sleuth to try to to figure out the answer before the sleuth does.

But it should also be a well-developed story, with three-dimensional characters and a vivid setting.

You can add interest to a mystery plot with red herrings, twists and turns. And you can suspense with techniques like foreshadowing and cliffhangers, and by raising the stakes for your sleuth.

A great ending to a mystery often manages to surprise the reader at the same time that the reader thinks, "I should have known!"

What you'll learn:

• How to develop a story idea for a mystery.
• How to come up with the character of your sleuth.
• How to structure a mystery plot.

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.

Intro to Description Writing

E-mail course. Students receive one lesson per day for three days.

Good description writing is the secret to vivid stories.

Instead of just reading words on the page, readers feel like they're inside the story's world, seeing and hearing and experiencing everything first-hand.

This course will show you a trick for imagining your story's details more vividly so that you can make them vivid for your reader.

Then it will show you how to choose details and words to bring your scenes to life in the reader's imagination.

What you'll learn:

• How to invent and choose details for your story's descriptions.
• How to write descriptions from your character's point of view.
• How to choose the right words for your descriptions.

Fill out the form below to take this course for free.