The Basics
What You Need To Know Before Getting Started
Hello Future Mastering Creative Writing Students and welcome to what I hope will be an inspiring ride for you.
I wanted to start off by telling you a little about why I decided to offer this class. I wrote a post on Medium about the importance of writing education and as I had assumed a lot of people wanted to further their writing education but life and budgets have restricted them. This was a subject that I was not unaware. In one of my seminars, we spoke ad nauseum about the need for more writers to create stories that are representative of the world we live in with all it’s beautiful layers. But the problem inherent in that is, is that continuing education is expensive and the very groups that we are trying to attract to the literary world for as much as they would love to become a part of it lack the funds to get there.
Well as what usually happens with academics, they mostly conjecture about the problem but offer no ideas, actionable ideas on how to fix the problem. That’s why I’m bringing, everything that I’ve learned and am learning to this space because I believe that writing education should be accessible.
Now I know what you’re thinking if I’m so adamant about bringing writing education to the masses why not make it free? I wish I could but hosting costs money and I’m hoping that enough of you will take the courses I provide to at the bare minimum offset the costs of hosting because right now I’m operating in the red. But I hope that as more of you attend classes, I can take any leftover monies and put it toward contests and give it out as a monetary award.
With all that said, what can you expect to learn while you’re in my class?
I plan to start with the basics, which are also free. I’m going to give you a rundown of all the common grammar mistakes that writers often make and give you a list of resources to get you started. All of which are free. Then once you’re up to speed on the basics, we’ll move into the harder stuff. We’ll talk about language and word choice. How to use literary devices in your work. We’ll go over point of view and how to decide which to use in your story. Plus a host of other topics. You’ll have homework, there’s lots of reading and writing involved and once you finish all of that and arrive at my capstone course. You’ll receive a critique of your work from me as part of the price of the course.
We’ll also have a Facebook group where we will critique each other’s exercises and a website where I’ll showcase the week’s best work. My goal is that in the end, I want to create a vibrant community of writers where we all can learn and grow from each other. The best way to learn how to write well is to read and write often, and that’s just what we’re going to do, together.
Your Instructor
Michelle Matthews is a graduate of the George Washington University. She is currently a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Fiction. A member of Sigma Tau Delta and currently holds a 4.0 GPA. She is also an alum of the Yale University Writer’s Workshop. In addition to her academic accomplishments, she adds the following publishing credits:
Essays published in the anthologies, Motherhood May Cause Drowsiness and Surviving Mental Illness Through Humor.
Her other essays have been published on: Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, The Mighty, Mamapedia, and Today Show Parents. On Medium in the publications: Lit Up, The Writing Cooperative, P.S. I Love You, and Writer’s Guild.
Upcoming: The short story Your Things, will be published in Helen, a literary magazine in their spring 2018 issue.
She also runs a successful blog and has had the honor of having a few of her posts go viral. In the midst of her internet successes, she has also published a novel and a selection of short stories. But the most impressive thing about Michelle Matthews is that she has managed to accomplish all of this in a three-year span of time.