Every form of art requires a certain unique skill set. Writing is among the most fundamental forms of art we possess. Creativity is a deep-rooted ability by which we analyze, acquire, and modify things by our understanding. In writing, what you perceive and imagine, if you can pen them down and incept it into the reader’s mind with your mesmerizing play of words, then you are a true artist named a creative writer. If you can write creatively, it depicts that you have the ability to think creatively, and as with any other skill, it will result in enhanced creativity. A great way to start your journey is to find the best creative courses for beginners.
What is Creative Writing?
A tendency of an individual to convey his thoughts and ideas in a lucid and engaging manner, that makes them appealing to the reader is what we call creative writing. It has been prevalent in our society for ages, unlike content writing, digital marketing, and many other domains, which flourished rapidly in the modern era when compared.
An Unbounded flow of thoughts and emotions that pave its path from your mind to the paper. Creative writing is mainly comprised of genres like fiction and non-fiction, and a wide range of subgenres as well including novels, novellas, poetry, screenplay, journals, biography, memoir, autobiography, and a lot more.
The skills required to write creatively are in high demand nowadays and people make a living out of it. The constant surplus demand for various creative work in the market makes it such a promising career to live up to. Creative writing courses for beginners are in great demand too.
Beyond the limitations and hard and fast set of rules in academic, formal spheres of writing, it is a craft of writing out your imagination that clings to the reader’s curiosity and compels him to hang around. A creative writer in his novel could present real-life scenarios, happenings, and facts in such an amusing way to give a pleasant experience to the reader and leave a mark on his heart.
Â
Why Is It Important?
1. Relive Moments
We all know at some instances in our life, we experience certain moments of ecstasy. If we could write those moments artistically with the same feelings and emotions attached; writing every small aspect of that very moment, then we can relive those moments. Let’s say branches of a tree jiggle while raining like it’s dancing.
2. Unleash Your Creative Ability
When we start writing and gain knowledge, it widens our perspective of ideas and imagination and leads us to the path of creative potential. With time we gather a certain set of vocabulary, artistic phrases, metaphors, and a lot more writing tools. All of these acquire writing stuff that ultimately helps us to write better, more innovative, and more artistic.
3. To Engage With People
Does it ever happen to you, when you just can’t take your eyes off and glue to the seat, lost in the piece of writing that you are reading? It happens a lot. That’s the power of creative writing, it can have an impact on people’s minds and certainly their attention too.
4. Lifelong Skill
After spending sufficient time with this skill, we gradually get better at it which soothes the path in front of us. The skills we acquire over time come fruitful in near future. If you choose creative writing courses for beginners, it will bestow your career with a kick start.
Types of Creative Writing
Creative writing can be classified into fiction and non-fiction genre. These can be further classified into sub-genre. Here is an extensive list of all writing categories. Creative writing courses for beginners cover all these elements in their curriculum.
Fiction
Poetry:
It is a genre of literature through which a writer attempts to evoke emotions and imagination in the reader’s mind by following certain poetic techniques like theme, sound, metaphors, simile, Oxymoron, personification, and many more. The language is rhythmic and appealing to the reader. Poems are of different types like a sonnet, free verse, Jingles, Limerick, Haiku, and a few more.
Novel:
A novel is a long Story where characters and turn of events are based on real-life experiences or the imagination of the novelist. A novel is primarily an imaginative story with an essence of reality. There is a wide spectrum of novels comprising science fiction, magical realism, Epistolary, Romance, History, and many more. The length of the novel is usually 40000 – 100000 words and can go beyond that. Other forms of lesser word writing can be classified as novella having 10000 – 40000 words and novelette – 7500 – 15000 words.
Short Story:
A short story is a lesser word writing that usually falls under 3000 – 7000 words. people can read it in one go. It is concise in plot twists and characters. The central idea of a short story is quite obvious to the reader. Short stories have been in the mainstream since the ancient era when Panchatantra-like stories originated. Some of the types of short stories are fables, anecdotes, fairy tales, mythological stories, etc.
Screenplays:
A screenplay is a roadmap or we can say a blueprint of a movie. It is an arrangement and synchronization of the scenes of a movie in a fascinating and appealing sequence. It gives the movie makers, dialogue writers, and the rest of the crew, a direction to proceed accordingly.
Non-Fiction
Biography:
Biography is the story of someone’s life through words which is written by someone else. It tells the events that took place from birth to death of an individual. Biography can be of a person who is alive, or a person who is not alive. The major aspect of someone’s biography is to tell what that person has been through; Whether it’s his romantic life, failures, victory, accomplishments, or certain incidents and happenings that inspired him to be in the position where he is now. Biographies demand thorough research on someone’s life. It’s like a one-on-one conversation with that person to know everything possible about him.
Â
Literary Journalism:
Literary denotes writing style. Literary journalism is a kind of creative nonfiction. It is supported by facts, information, and proof after thorough research. The columns in newspapers and magazines are a part of it. It represents true events creatively. It sometimes overlaps with personal essays, travel writing, etc.
A memoir is somewhat different from a biography. In the memoir, a person writes about a significant and noteworthy moment of his life. It’s always written in the first person where the writer narrates the incident in his own words and the sensations attached to it. There is no influence of other person’s views on it, it is solely an individual’s pivotal moment.
Scriptwriting:
Scriptwriting is complimenting screenplay with dialogues, characters, stage direction, the intensity of the role, visual presentation for movies, theatre, Tv shows, etc. It defines the overall outline of a movie.
Explore more about the top-rated Online Creative Writing Courses
Essential Elements of Creative Writing
There are certain techniques and frameworks we can apply directly to our writing, that are being taught in creative writing courses for beginners to provide a decent and creative structure to it. Keeping these pointers in mind simplifies the process of writing. A few of them are mentioned below:
Â
Creating a Theme:
It is a central idea constituting the overall structure of any poetry, drama, novel, or short story. Everything that is mentioned revolves somehow around this underlining idea. It works as a pillar in framing the actual work of art. It’s the way the author tries to convey his point of view and message to us.
Establishing the characters:
Characters are undoubtedly the most crucial part of a story. Characters that are interesting and memorable that people can relate to, contribute to a great story. It’s important to make more realistic characters, writing their value, desire, decisions that changed the course of their life, people whom they admire, and how they conquer after a defeat.
Laying Down The Plot:
The plot is the layout, it’s a sketch of how things will proceed. We have the theme, characters, and settings, but the way we arrange and correlate them in the best possible manner is a recipe for a good story. When the mystery of a piece of writing should be revealed? At what instant a character must be introduced? When should the twist be inserted? etc, are the compilation plot development.
Fabricating Poetic Devices:
Poetic devices are a set of intangible tools that a writer uses to beautify or enhance the attractiveness and readiness of his writing, usually a poem. Poetic devices are many, yet naming few of them are rhyming, personification (my favorite), Simile, hyperbole, and metaphor.
Career Prospect and Scope of Creative Writing
Author:
Being an author is a fascinating job. When you get paid for the art you love, it’s satisfying. Over time, your reputation or value increases multifold making it such a lucrative career. Your imaginative boundaries will stretch, and your perspectives will enhance. Your credibility and probability will improve drastically when you reach a benchmark in this domain. Your work includes fiction like novels, novellas, and short stories. It also includes non-fiction, etc.
Script Writer:
A scriptwriter is slightly different from a story writer, the scriptwriter has to write a story, detail of characters, manage the screenplay, mentioning of the premise. After doing this stuff, he has to write dialogues, and lengths of the film accordingly. A script writer gets around 3-4% of the amount for this work. If the film is worth 2 crores, you get 6-8 lakhs.
Blogger:
Blogging as a career is in high demand. People are coming up with their success blogging stories. Its credibility is unquestionable. This career is like a business that is fruitful as well as risky to some extent. If you put in some years in it following its fundamental principles, it will take you in a decent position. Blogging is a research-based work that will improve your analytical capability
A copywriter’s job is to write persuasively that compels the target audience to take some action, whether it’s purchasing, login into a website, social media posts, landing pages, and a lot more. Copywriters are masters who are well trained to write irresistibly. A copywriter’s work is called a “copy”. A copywriter follows the AIDA formula that stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. Any business requires a copy to generate sales of its products and services.
Proofreading:
proofreading refers to reading and correcting any written work. Your job is to find and Omit grammatical errors, sentence improvement, incorrect sentences, fluffy words, etc. An expert proofreader earns handsome money.
Social Media Manager:
A job of a social media manager is to create engaging posts, schedule them, and organize them in such a way as to generate leads and attract potential customers. Studying posts analytics, growth perspectives, researching and analysis for better strategy, replying to queries, comments, customer handling, etc. It’s a very fruitful career option as social media is blooming in leaps and bounds these days.
Dig into the post to find the most-opted Creative Writing Courses in India
Best Institutes for Creative Writing Courses for Beginners
Here is the list of institutes that offer creative writing courses for beginners to get the knack for it.
1. IIM Skills
IIM Skills is a leading online educational institute. It comes up with multiple professional courses represented in categories on its website, whether it’s writing, marketing, and finance. The supportive and compassionate faculty make their mark when it comes to delivering top education. The creative writing course offered, named ‘Content Writing Course” is of optimum quality and has an updated relevant curriculum. It will serve a significant role to shape and flourish your career. It is one of the best creative writing courses for beginners.
Course Highlights
- 4 weeks of Live online classroom training.
- 3 months assured internship.
- 16 hours of comprehensive classes and 14 hours of lectures related to the internship.
- Tools worth 35000 will be freely provided for those who enrolled in the course.
- IIM Skills master certification and getting prepared for HubSpot content marketer certificate.
Course Offerings
- You can launch a content writing agency.
- You will get lifetime support whether it’s technical or non-technical.
- Resume and portfolio development for freelancing and jobs.
- You will publish your first E-book on Google books and Kindle.
- You will publish your first press release on the online news portal.
Course Curriculum
There are 8 modules in this course which are listed below.
- Creative Writing Introduction.
- Web development through WordPress.
- Article writing and blogging.
- Fiction writing.
- Non-fiction writing.
- screenplay and script writing.
- Novel and short story writing.
- Types of writing in poetry.
2. Coursera
Coursera is one of the biggest online learning platforms for skills enhancement. It’s a medium that plays a role to provide courses, certifications, and specializations directly from top universities to learners. The learner base of Coursera is humongous. Their creative writing course includes novels, short stories, blogs, screenplays, and ad scripts. Coursera has a huge number of creative writing courses for beginners.
Course Highlights of Creative Writing Courses for Beginners
- You can learn at your own pace.
- Don’t worry, if don’t have a laptop. It is smartphone friendly.
- They assist you in your career placement support.
- Internshala training certificate.
- 4 tasks of assignment writing to grasp the concepts.
- Doubts clearing sessions.
- Friendly for beginners.
- 1 hour per day for 6 weeks(flexible timings).
- Downloadable media, you can excess anytime anywhere.
Here are the best Creative Writing Courses in Gurgaon
3. Udemy
Udemy is the most familiar name that comes to our minds when we hear the words online learning. It is a learning and teaching platform or you can say a marketplace where course counts cross 2 lakh+. All categories of courses are available here. Major categories are design, development, marketing, IT, Personal development, business, photography, and music. It is one of the best platforms to learn creative writing. There are a lot of options to choose from among creative writing courses for beginners.
Course Highlights of Creative Writing Courses for Beginners
- 43 video lessons in total.
- All video sessions follow the same criteria.
- An assignment will be given after each day’s lesson.
- A practical application project.
- 37 online quizzes covering the major concepts, Quizzes will be there, to brush up on what you have learned.
- Practical guiding course to make you enthusiastic about getting your creative writing journey started.
- Literary devices and writing techniques will be discussed.
- Become a successful and confident writer.
- All genres of creative writing.
- Assignment to brush up on your acquired knowledge.
- Opportunities to publish your work.
Also Read: Creative Writing Courses in Delhi
4. Skillshare
Skillshare is a primary choice of newcomer creators. Premium membership of it is like a one-time investment, that allows you to enroll in various courses at once. You can set a target for yourself to finish as many skill courses as you can in your chosen period. Some of its course categories are productivity, Marketing, Film making, Videography, entrepreneurship, health and fitness, and a lot more. Their creative writing courses for beginners are the best in the market.
Course Highlights
- This course is divided into 27 lecture modules.
- 20 assignments with guidance.
- Flexible timings.
- Nurturing and encouraging your imagination.
5. Internshala
Internshala is a globally esteemed institute that provides several courses and certificates. It is ranked among the top education platforms. They believe in the best quality of learning and provide learners with wholesome exposure to the industry. Their creative writing course has fiction, drama, Non-fiction, and poetry. They have top-notch educators in their respective fields. Their specialty is their creative writing courses for beginners. Apart from this, Internshala is one of the most scrolled job sites that has transformed the lives of many aspires in varied domains. You can also give shape to your career by becoming a part of their courses.
Course Highlights
- Completely practical training.
- Project support.
- Internship assistance.
- Certification of completion.
- guaranteed placement.
- User-friendly E-learning access.
- Platform to unleash your creativity.
- Assured job support along with proper guidance and exposure to the industry.
You may also be interested in Creative Writing Courses in Chennai
FAQs
Q1. How can a beginner start creative writing?
A beginner can attend demo classes or orientation classes at different institutions to know more about this topic. If you already know then it’s your personal choice to choose an institute’s curriculum or self-exploring online. Both options can lead to the right track. I prefer you to attend the orientation session of IIM Skills, It’s free and makes you aware of various aspects related to it. They elaborate on creative writing courses for beginners in their orientation classes.
Q2. What are the 5 types of creative writing?
Creative writing can be broadly classified into fiction and nonfiction, which could be further divided into sub-categories that include novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, screenplays, drama, journals, biography, Autobiography, script, memoir, etc.
Q3. How can I learn creative writing for free?
Several platforms provide free-of-cost creative writing courses to develop your imagination and creativity. Some of them are Reedsy, Open Edu, Udemy, Creative writing now, Coursera, Writer’s HQ, and Upskillist. You will find topic-specific videos on YouTube and Google in just a few clicks. You can Google the term creative writing courses for beginners and get an idea of what you should learn by researching the curriculums of various institutes.
Q4. Why is creative writing so hard?
Creative writing may seem hard at first but if you follow the right track and fundamentals then the process of learning will be easy. Try to cover basic concepts first, apply them in your writing, get feedback from genuine sources, and then you are all set to pave the path to success for you.
Q5. How do I start Creative writing as an adult?
It’s good you think of pursuing this art of writing. Creative writing can be learned irrespective of age. Firstly, you should acquaint yourself with the know-how of it, its significance, types, Career prospects, future, and scope. Then you should begin with a free demo of institutes. I prefer IIM Skills, it is an orientation session that is best for you to start your journey.