This week, I decided to finally take the plunge and enrol into a course with the Australian Writers Centre.

I had been eyeing this course for some time but made plenty of excuses not to do it.

Frankly, my money could be better spent on things around the house that need improvement or fixing (plumbing and electrical work, a new dishwasher, or even a little holiday which we haven’t had since before COVID). However, this couldn’t wait. I kept thinking that if I delayed enrolling any longer, I’d never sign up.

I found the Australian Writers Centre (AWC) online and it appealed to me. I liked the various courses and I downloaded a little course some time ago. I like how it’s set up with a learning management platform and how there are assignments where you get feedback from real instructors.

I’m usually a self-learner but I need some structure initially to set me off. Once I have the structure, I can create ‘the plan’ and the rest well, it’s just writing. My issue is that I don’t have the basics. I can start to write but I have no idea if what I’m doing is right without any feedback.

Creative Writing Stage 1 is a fundamental course for the AWC if you want to learn to write fiction. Module 1 which was on Character Development opened up as soon as I paid for the course and immediately, I got a lot of value listening to the podcasts and doing the exercises.

As I’m also using Scrivener at the same time, I found that the AWC Character Development template is a nice fit with that too. I changed Scrivener’s Character template (too basic) with the AWC (very detailed) and over the last few days, I have written some in-depth character outlines. The strange thing was that as I was writing them, the story seemed to come out from simply delving deep into the character. All of a sudden I could see the different ‘situations’ I could put the characters into.

I never had that before.

Yesterday I pulled out of golf and instead spent three hours writing. I tapped out over 2500 words and a short story with three characters, a beginning, a conflict, a tension high, a twist and an end. I was rapt!

Writing is addictive. I now have a character template that I can use for future projects.

Let’s see where all this takes me.

Here are my notes from completing Module 1 this week:

Module 1: Character Development

• Thinking about character goes much deeper than I thought.  In some way, I feel like you need to understand the character before jumping into the story.  Sometimes, the story comes out of defining the character’s back story. 
  • What happened then?  While I was writing out the story of my character, Eddie (“Knuckles”) Noonan, I had no idea of what story might evolve from this soon-to-retire from petty crim protagonist and during my morning walk, I came up with a plot of how he would need to work with another character, soon-to-retire too – Sergeant Carl McIntyre to get Eddie’s wayward son, Simon out of impending trouble. (I’ve been watching too many Guy Ritchie films as I had NO interest in writing about petty crims but there you go, it just came out as I started writing and couldn’t stop. My imagination had fired up!) All of a sudden, by using the Developing Characters Template the plot and story came out of writing that in detail! (What the?! I thought).  In the past, I had “an idea” of a character but never understood their motivations or personality so they became one-dimensional resulting in always losing the impetus to write further as I’d run out of ideas.  
• The formatting of using single quotation versus double quotation.  I used the latter never the former. 
  • My new habit change: Must change the habit of tapping SHIFT ” and instead just tap the ‘ – that’s YEARS of habit to be undone.
• I was wasting too much time trying to figure out what platform to use for my writing.  I’m an Apple Mac user although I used to work for a Microsoft partner and know how to use Word quite well but I wanted a way to have everything in one place.  I have used Apple Pages, Google Docs, Microsoft Word docs even Apple Notes – it’s a bit of a mess.  Then I figured I was wasting time using all this stuff. I needed ONE platform. 
  • What I’m Now Doing: I’m trialling Scrivener which I like as it’s just a writing platform – to be honest it seems like a cut down version of OneNote and MS Word – but it has templates that you can customise and your entire work IS IN THE ONE PLACE.  I spent my morning customising Scrivener with the Character template provided by AWS and changing all the formats to suit AWC requirements. I’m going to buy a licence because I like how I can use the templates and have everything in one place.
• What I Learned in the First Week: Genius idea: Don’t edit as you go.  Always know the END or the GOAL of the character and keep heading them towards that.  Only AFTER you have done this, you can edit.  This was a brain spark because I always edited as I wrote and in the end, kept changing it so much that the story just petered out – lacked the sizzle and I lost interest – and then I stopped writing. So now, every ‘scene’ or ‘chapter’ I’ll make sure I know what I want the character to do/achieve by the end of it.

Speaking of Guy Ritchie films, have you seen the excellent Netflix series, The Gentlemen? I LOVED its creative elements and the little plot twists. All the characters too as well as their back story. Even the premise of aristocrats unable to upkeep their castles and having to resort to pandering to crime lords. The chicken. Everything. It’s Brilliant – I’ll watch it a second time soon to see what I could learn about twists….

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