What’s it like to learn with AWC?

I was writing my first novel and was keen to know how to create compelling and engaging characters.

The course provides so much information about understanding your characters and the importance of working out how they interact, think, behave, respond, and why. This helps the characters create the story!

My characters will be more developed now that I've done the course. I look forward to building them further and changing some interactions with other characters. The course has identified how to do this.

What a great source of information and coaching for writing all sorts of materials. They are professional and practical, understand the technicalities of writing in different genres and make learning easy.

I wanted to bring my characters alive on the page and singing in my readers' minds.

I enjoyed the detail about how characters are researched and created. The idea of getting a better understanding of your primary and secondary characters. I'm a pantser so I make it up along the way.

If you want to understand and master the ins and outs of character needs and desires, do this course!

I had some ideas for short stories and novellas but had no idea about character creation and development. I wanted to learn how to create real, believable characters to give stories punch and leave the future readers impacted in some way.

I thought there was an incredible amount of detail in the course to fully equip me to write great characters and also plot. I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I now see this course as an arsenal in my toolkit!

It is structured and practical. There were a lot of really helpful examples that started to get my brain ticking over by just listening to them. Now I know where and how to start collating and developing my story ideas. This course has helped me capture the overwhelm into a structure I can now use going forward.

AWC will equip you with whatever tools you need to get your writing onto the page and make the stories happen. Make sure you sign up for their courses.

Really excellent information - I got a lot out of it. A few aha! moments. Great videos. Excellent, specific content that I could apply to my stories.

I'm more confident I know what I need to make compelling characters.

Highly recommended if you are looking for specific tips to improve your writing. There were constant aha! moments, where the course identified things I knew instinctively when I read books, but hadn't kept in mind when trying to write them.

I always underdevelop my characters and only realise after I start writing, so I wanted a step-by-step guide on how to create a fleshed-out character before I started and got myself stuck.

Going in, there was a little part of me that was worried it would be a repeat of all the advice out there for creating characters, the advice being a checklist of their favourite colours and whatnot. I'm so glad to have been wrong!

I'm not exaggerating when I say I'll be using the activities in this course to help plan my characters and stories from now on. I know both my characters and my plot so much better now.

I found the handouts very helpful, and the videos excellent. I enjoyed being able to do it at my own pace.

The course has enabled me to look at my characters I had already established and give them a voice, to tell me their story.

Do this Essentials course. Give your characters a chance to tell you their back story. This course has enabled me to think why Seb and Amber in my story behave the way they do. My characters have a voice.

This course was excellent, I found that the handouts, which you can download, and the videos are really good and very well-articulated.

This course was fantastic. The worksheets are handy, and the tips very helpful. It gave me insight into the formation of my characters. I would definitely recommend this course to build your characters.

Thanks.

I wanted to learn more about crafting meaningful characters before diving into writing my own novel. Without this course, I wouldn't have noticed some potential issues with my initial planning.

The examples, worksheets/activities and overall presentation were very engaging and helpful. Not once did I zone out and have to re-wind! A wonderful course.

This course helped me consider characters from angles that I hadn't even thought to investigate. I think the characters, narrative voice and relationships I've now been able to craft are significantly more meaningful than what I had started with. The worksheets/activities are very helpful and really promote reflective thinking. They're also embedded into the audio lessons and are explained explicitly. Nothing in this course felt like a waste of time or money or a time filler. I now have resources and skills that I will definitely come back to in the future.

It really pushed home how well you need to know your characters before you start writing them. And the more I heard that the more I became convinced that of course that is true. And because of that I have been able to produce a far better mind map of my story than I had initially.

I enjoyed the raft of great ideas and tools for developing my characters - the stress on knowing your characters so you can write them.

I now know why my characters were same ole same ole. I now know my three key characters. I now have a good sound structure for my story. I now have hurdled the roadblock that was stopping me from writing this particular book.

It is a good and thorough course. It will bring home to you the big things about writing fiction. It will also bring home to you the little things. So you get the meat. And the gravy.

As I am well into writing a novel, it reassured me that I seem to be getting a lot of it right but also provided tips for me to build upon. The information on when to bring in descriptions of characters and how much to describe is great.

I had created a character that was not interesting and wanted to better understand, through expert guidance, the complexities and technique of memorable character development.

The content was well-structured and accessible.

Do it! The content will help you with technique and improve your craft. It's self-paced and effectively delivered, with lessons supported by downloadable handouts. And it's not expensive and is great value for money.

This is a great add-on course after doing Creative Writing Stage 1 and it can be done at your own pace so definitely suits busy people.

I enjoyed learning the questions I need to ask myself when building a character. Also the checklists in the handouts.

Digging deeper into my characters and giving them more depth has been very exciting and rewarding, and learning so much more than what I thought I already knew, and now armed with all this knowledge, I hope I can create something to be proud of.

I feel I am now equipped to make my characters real and not just cardboard cut outs.

I loved the checklists to help better know your characters, introducing them, and relationships between them. Will be using these a lot!

I enjoyed doing the mind maps. In fact, all the exercises - they were very helpful.

I've been wanting to write a novel for the past couple of years and did the basic creative writing course. When this course came up on special, I thought it was time to learn more.

I enjoyed the whole thing. I liked the examples and the presenter who made it very easy to understand and relate to.

The suggestions and ideas I learnt have made me rethink completely the relationships between some of my characters in my first novel draft.

I would recommend (and have!) Australian Writers' Centre courses to anyone interested in writing as they are motivational and very informative and enjoyable.

I enjoyed listening to the audio and completing the exercises.

It made me look at the little synchronicities within my story and cause and effect. The effect of an event on a character and then that effect to other characters and the tumbling effect onwards.

Excellent, practical and easy to follow content from experienced tutors. Always giving you many different approaches to problematic pitfalls.

I am grateful that the AWC does on-demand courses to suit schedules. I like the ability to pause the audio, download the audio and download the handout. I like the summary of each point that is raised at each time during the audio - this is helpful for revisiting. I like that the content was concise.

The course has made me appreciate back story so much more and, as a result of fleshing out the back story of my three characters, I know additional plot events that I need to explore. It also emphasized how I want the reader to first feel about a character and how that changes over the course of the story (and therefore what I need to do to in terms of plot to bring about the change in the character and therefore the change in the reader's feelings).

I would recommend this course as it is concise and very helpful and informative. It is also ideal as it is on-demand for 12 months (with audio and hands outs being downloadable) so you can go through the course in your own time and at your own pace.

The content was in-depth and the practical guidelines very useful to consolidate my knowledge. It has certainly provided me with more confidence and understanding of how to develop my characters. There is so much to learn about character development!

I'd highly recommend this course as it really spelt out the elements of character development that I was not aware of.

I completed the Creative Writing Stage 1 course first and found this course a great course to follow up. It was a rewarding process to work through to further developing my characters.

I found the process of working at my own pace through this course gave me the freedom to take my time and really absorb the ideas shared.

Although I'd thought I had given my characters a background story, it really made me think and understand their motivations more fully.

There will be less writer's block if you put in the work to fully develop your characters, then you can focus on the storyline and enjoy the writing process because you know how your characters think, feel and react to certain situations in your story!

Inspired me to write again and to get the character floating in my head down on a piece of paper.