Friday end of writing course haiku

Writing course finished.
Time to focus on writing,
markets to conquer!

Today marks the end of the writing course I’m taking with the Open University, as the final assignment (worth 70% of overall course mark) is due. I submitted mine last night, in a rare example of beating the deadline by a mile, and now the waiting game begins. Marking may take a couple of months.

It’s a basic level 12-week online course that I decided to take in order to pick up any fundamentals that I may have missed throughout the years. It turns out that I’d missed very little, but there were a few bits here and there that were useful, it was excellent practice, it gave me a huge ego boost (the feedback on the first assignment was stunning), and it provided the ability to get the work critiqued objectively (something I now can obtain via my writing group).

The other reasons I took the course were to give me confidence in my abilities by knowing I understand the fundamentals, to be able to say that I have taken a formal creative writing course, and it acts as a good preliminary to a more intensive course of study. The natural progression from this course is Creative Writing, which is a year-long course representing around 600 hours of study and costing over £600, so is not something to be taken on lightly. Other choices include an MFA degree course or other individual courses, either with the OU or elsewhere. If I do decide to take another course sometime soon, expect I’ll mix-and-match individual OU courses with third-party courses.

While I very much want to develop my creative writing skills, I also very much want to develop scriptwriting skills — primarily screenwriting for film and television. As of October 2009, the OU seems to have completely flushed all screenwriting and playwriting courses out of their course list… including the basic level Start Writing Plays course I wanted to take. It’s possible they’re in the process of developing new courses, particularly as there are excellent private screenwriting and playwriting courses available for comparable cost, but I’ll have to wait and see.

So for now, my plans are to just get on with writing and submitting work to markets, as well as gaining a foothold in periodicals that interest me. I now know I have the necessary fundamentals, so now it’s just a case of putting it to practice more often and playing the submit-and-wait game.