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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Creative Writing: The Craft of Character by Wesleyan University

4.5
stars
1,864 ratings

About the Course

At the center of a good story are the characters in it. In this course aspiring writers will discover how to build and bring to life complex, vivid and unforgettable characters. We will study the choices a writer makes to bring all characters to life on the page, and we will perform written exercises in order to develop a variety of writing and pre-writing techniques, in order to create a variety of characters. We will learn how to use our own life experiences, and the people we know (and how not to!). We will develop inner (thoughts and feelings) and outer (appearance, habits, behavior) lives for our characters and see how that can lead us to richer and more interesting stories. We will breathe life into our characters and let them surprise us....

Top reviews

SS

Aug 10, 2016

I loved this course! Extremely useful and hands on. The course instructor was really impressive, both informative and empathetic, both arty and to the point. Totally admired her style of instruction.

NM

Sep 25, 2020

The course was very well-structured and challenging. The instructor is very experienced and good, thus used relevant materials for this course, be it the guests, or the assignments, or the examples.

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476 - 500 of 551 Reviews for Creative Writing: The Craft of Character

By Brooke B

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Jun 17, 2020

Great course, but I do wish the actual instructors gave their feedback on your work.

By Erick A

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Oct 24, 2020

Muy buen curso, te da todas las herramientas básicas para crear tu personaje

By Robert M H

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May 4, 2018

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By Margot R M

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Jun 8, 2016

Liked this course. It helps to make sure character is central to the plot

By Claribelle D

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Oct 14, 2018

Somtimes the assignment instructions were hard to understand.

By Shreyashi K

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May 10, 2020

It was an amazing course, helped me hon my writing skills.

By Madhu K S

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Jul 23, 2018

Liked the course. Assignments were not very clear to me.

By Norrarat S

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Sep 21, 2017

great course ! help me a lot on my fantasy novel writing

By Elsa W P

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May 31, 2017

I enjoyed the exploration, and the writing exercises.

By Sumit S

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Oct 30, 2018

Great and helpful.

10/10 would recommend

By Pawee S

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Jan 8, 2018

nice lectures and lesson activities

By Adonay O G

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May 4, 2020

Very demanding, I'm worn out.

By Ritu G

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Apr 20, 2016

Very insightful .Thanks

By Victor F A

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Oct 4, 2016

Excellent course!

By Tim J

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May 26, 2017

Excellent class!

By Andrea E M

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May 30, 2019

Very helpful :)

By Andy S

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Feb 14, 2024

Course material was was good, and interesting throughout. The peer review system however was almost useless the majority of the time. There is nothing to stop people not reviewing or giving no feedback of any kind which very much undermines the product. As consequence there's no way for students to know if they are improving at all. A large number of students are also not complying with the task requirements and are submitted garbage (for what reason i have no idea), but still appear to be progressing. Without removing both these categories of people the course will continue to suffer. It's a real shame as the material is good but the marking system is incredibly poor. This is particularly the case in Capstone where feedback is so essential but i received absolutely nothing during this phase. I honestly have no idea, despite having completed the entire course, if what I'm writing is any good at all, or if I have improved in any way which is very disheartening.

By Susan C

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Oct 16, 2023

The course was really good, but the peer review system leaves a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the opportunity to practice my writing skills, but at least 2/3 of the peer reviews were complete bunk: one word answers like "Yes", or "ok", or just gibberish "dddddd". I understand that for the price you don't necessarily get personalized instruction from professional writers, but it should be trivial for Coursera to implement in their SW platform some screening of students (or bots?) generating garbage instead of constructive contributions. I really appreciate the efforts and interesting content from the professors and writers leading the class; it's a shame the Coursera system doesn't enable a way for it to be used more productively. Expect that you will hear from interesting teachers; don't expect that you will get a lot of useful feedback on your own writing.

By judy t

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Aug 2, 2019

I would have given this course 5 stars except for the grading. The only reviewers of your work are fellow students. Some of them do a good job telling you what they liked about the writing and some do not just answering "yes or no" to questions asked. It would be nice if a TA or other students actually in the writing courses at Wesleyan read your work. I have learned a lot and I have liked the assignments but that is where the value has stopped. I know there are too many students for the faculty to grade or even read our work but it would be much more valuable if we really knew how we are doing. The discussion board is sporadically attended and really of no value. Feedback is important in writing and this is the part of these courses that is missing.

By Catherine B

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Aug 10, 2016

The lectures in this class are well done and informative, and they provide a lot of good material. However, the assignment portion needs a lot of work. The instructions weren't clear for anyone taking the class which resulted in incredibly difficult grading. It was hard to even understand the basic ideas of what was required for an assignment.

I think the teacher very much needs to go back and change the wording of the assignments, add more information in the instructions, and also post an example to show what is expected since a lot of the assignments are very strange, like a describing a character without mentioning the character in any way.

By RDS

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Jul 23, 2020

This would be challenging one for you, since it is mainly on development of characters, dialogues for your fiction. The tutor is good and has deep sense on characterization, though I did feel some difficulty in getting the concrete idea or point encompassed in the lecture plan. Coming to assignments, as a learner, we have to give our strong reviews for our peers, but here most people wanted to get just grades for extra-certificate, it would be completely fine, if all participate seriously as well as attentive. I am going to apply what I extract from it, and yeah, anyway, it helped me. Thanks :0) coursera.

By Sanika

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May 10, 2019

A very interesting course, provided great insights into the in-depth process of creating character. The assignments were challenging and the peer feedback was very beneficial. I just wish the course focused more on the technicalities involved in character creation. Many of the points raised in each module felt repetitive. More energy and engagement from the main instructor would also have been helpful. Overall a perfectly satisfactory course that really got me writing. Thank you to the instructor and all the guest writers for their time and effort.

By Sinny N

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Nov 22, 2020

I wish the professor explanation were a little clearer, I always had to watch videos two or three times to take notes and understand what she was saying. Also, I know there's not a formula to create a good character, but I feel I missed a lot of it because I couldn't understand her, she talks a lot and uses little explanation and too much passage reading. I would have like the uses of character charts or templates, and more book terms definitions. Overall, there were a few videos that were very eyed opening, specially the ones with other writers.

By David R

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Apr 24, 2021

The most helpful part of this course was the books that Amy Bloom recommended and sited during the lectures. While her descriptions of how to create compelling characters was interesting, I didn't come away from the course with specific exercises or tools I could use. Also, I put a lot of work into the assignments and was disappointed with the scant feedback I received from my peers. Some reviewers simply entered single letters in their question boxes so that they could score my work and move on. Is there some way to police that?

By Kristin L

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Mar 5, 2017

The course information was great and the assignments were very helpful. What lost points for the course was not the content provided by Wesleyan, which was good, but the poor effort on the part of many of the fellow students to really work on constructive critiques. For each assignment I had at least one of the three peer reviews that was useless to me to improve my writing, sometimes more. There should be a way to rate critiques so that students can't move on if they don't do the work of critiquing well.