How Writers Write Fiction

How Writers Write Fiction 2015 will be taught in English as follows: each week, instructors Merrill and Flournoy will post a new video class. In this video class, they will introduce two or three short video lectures given by successful authors of fiction. Featured authors will include Venise Berry, Edward Carey, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Bernice Chauly, Susan Taylor Chehak, Boris Fishman, Angela Flournoy, Paul Harding, Boaz Gaon, Andrew Sean Greer, Naomi Jackson, Leslie Jamison, Mamle Kabu, Jonathan Lethem, Margot Livesy, Stephen Lovely, Peter Orner, and Douglas Trevor, among others. Each week, the video class will be followed by a set of fiction-writing assignments based on the topics these authors presented in their lectures. These assignments will invite you to write fiction, post your work to the MOOC website, and engage in community feedback with your fellow writers. Supplementary readings will also be posted for your exploration.

Each week, a team of teaching moderators, all MFA graduates with substantial writing and teaching experience, will lead live discussions of the video topics and the challenges of the writing assignments around the clock in the MOOC discussion forum. Community moderators will actively support the participation of writers who are new to online learning, new to writing fiction, and/or writing as nonnative speakers of English. These community moderators will facilitate the formation of writing groups and support the vitality and inclusivity of your international writing community. Each week's video class will be followed by a "fiction fundamentals" video, in which a teaching moderator or guest author will offer an in-depth analysis of the week's writing themes; a discussion of the fiction fundamentals video will follow in the MOOC discussion forum.