There’s two things I’m finding pleasantly challenging about my course so far. The first thing is the word count – we’re just ending Week 5, and word counts have gone from a steady 500 words per piece to a couple of very sneaky 700 word limits, as well as a few “500 words max but it’s probably going to be a short poem” tasks. It’s nice to have a bit of variation in form while also pushing my writing capabilites in terms of the length of pieces. Last week’s tasks had me particularly uninspired and were the usual 500 word cap, yet by the weekend I was editing both of them down to try and get within the word count.

The second is more specifically related to our Creative Writing Practice module, which is currently covering “Introduction to Writing Fiction”. Week by week we have been looking at seperate parts of writing fiction, such as character or setting. Our weekly tasks involve writing a piece with a focus on the week’s subject while still having our piece make sense as a well-rounded story. It’s been fun to analyse my own process and realise that some things I inherently focus on more anyway, but oh shit – that’s taking away too much from my portrayal of X, or making me write a beautiful description of a location at which precisely nothing interesting happens.