Fiction Writing is a craft.

After the first burst of inspiration-led outpouring comes the revision that takes care of the 'crafty bits'; the rearrangement of sentences, the inserting of information to give later events in the story credibility, the removal of repeated words, the trick of making dialogue sound real – in fact the sneaky use of a hundred and one little devices that the reader never notices but the writer employs deliberately.

Good fiction is a clever con-trick. Its construction is complicated, but thankfully there are ways to achieve the apparently effortless story and those ways can be taught.

If you're interested in writing, and especially if you intend to publish your writing (either with a publisher or by self-publishing) it makes sense to learn all you can and get to be as good a writer as you can be.

There are three ways to do that.

1. There's the trial and error way, where you spend years writing and getting rejected, slowly learning where you're going wrong and gradually learning how to put it right.
2. Or the second way, which is to take a course or two and deliberately find out how to write from the beginning. The trouble here, it's all theory and no practise.
3. Most people do a bit of both, which is the ideal, third, way.

The Third Way

Start writing and spend some time with the keyboard, or the pen and paper if you like that better. Find out if you really enjoy the process of putting words on paper or screen.

Many people fall in love with the idea of being a writer. They're attracted to the lifestyle (writing by the beach?), the glamour (media covered book signings?) or the money (first time author nets six figure advance?).

When they discover that writing is actually hard work, lonely, pays very poorly and you still have to treat it like a job and do it everyday (not to mention the funny stares you get from people if you say you're a writer), they quickly realise it's not the easy option they'd hoped for.

But if you're one of the rare breed who actually enjoys spending long hours by yourself (I'm not counting the legion characters in your head who'll talk to you from morning till night if you let them), and you don't mind funny looks when people ask you what you do; if you can grow a thick enough skin to not mind criticism and you can bear to murder your darlings, then maybe, just maybe, you're a writer-in-waiting and you'll discover the happy medium of 'the third choice'.

You'll write a bit, get rejected a bit, take a course and repeat as necessary. You'll get there in the end, and you'll get there a whole lot quicker than those who take routes 1 and 2. Why?

Because you're learning on the job.

You'll put into practise whatever you learn in your courses and try it out in the big, bad world of commissioning editors. You'll know, through experience, where your weak spots are and what you need to work on, and you'll seek out courses aimed specifically at helping you to overcome them.

You won't get bogged down in information overload where you're trying to juggle so many rules, so much of what to do and what not to do that you can't write a word without feeling you're doing it wrong.

You'll learn a bit, write a bit, learn a bit more and write a lot more. You'll still make mistakes (we all do) but you'll learn much quicker to recognise tthose mistakes and, more importantly, you'll instinctively know how to correct them.

Gradual learning seeps into your being. You hardly realise it's happening until you recognise the fact that you're suddenly able to help people with something that you too struggled with previously.

Taking a short course, particularly a course you can complete in your own time and on your own terms, is the perfect vehicle for the 'learn a bit, do a bit' model.

Most of my short courses are designed to do just that. I've taken modules from classroom taught lessons and broken them down even further into bite-sized chunks that are delivered weekly to your email box. You complete the lessons in your own time with no pressure to complete one before the next one arrives.

The beauty of email courses is they wait for you. There is no hurry and you are in complete control.

At the end of each lesson is a homework assignment designed to lead you into practicing that week's material. Whether you use it 'as is' or adapt to suit one of your own projects is, again, up to you. The flexibility never ends.

Browse the courses available so far (more are currently in development and will be posted here asap) and if any take your eye you can sign up and get started right away.