WHAT YOU NEED TO GET STARTED

Lesson Videos

  • This unique product is a set of four courses, each keyed to a specific work of fiction. They can be purchased as a set or individually.
  • 4 courses with seventeen or eighteen 20-25 minute videos each (70 total videos).
    • Writing Through the Wardrobe
    • Writing with Hobbits
    • Writing Through To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Writing with the Bog Owl
  • Available streamed as individual purchases, or via Membership with over 30+ other courses.

Supplemental Writing Exercises

  • Available as a digital file with your purchase.
  • Includes an optional creative writing exercise for every lesson in each course.

Need help organizing the digital curriculum? We’ve got a helpful entry on our blog that covers just that!

HOW CREATIVE WRITING WORKS

Creative Writing is a video-based, self-paced course designed to teach careful readers to become confident writers using beloved classics.

Each of the brief seminar-style videos is accompanied by a writing prompt that asks the writer to develop a concept covered in the lecture. The videos are viewed through our Learning Management System, a progressive set of steps that can be tracked by the user to completion.

We recommend homeschools budget 25 minutes for the video element, and at least 15-30 minutes to attempt the composition element. The writing prompts are optional, but recommended—Dr. Rogers himself designed them as exercises to fit the content of his lectures. The videos and accompanying writing prompts could be spaced across a week to provide ample time for rewatching and revision.

The curriculum is organized around topics more than a certain number of days or weeks. We recommend parents review the list of topics shown below in order to determine how best to fit the lessons into your homeschool.

List of Video Lessons

Each course contains 17 or 18 video lessons. The courses themselves can be taken individually or in any order you choose.

  1. Narration and Point of View (35:17)
  2. Inversion and Juxtaposition, Characterization (30:35)
  3. Showing and Telling, Description (29:29)
  4. Dramatic Irony (23:59)
  5. Exposition (21:46)
  6. Some Guidelines for Dialogue (19:52)
  7. More on Dialogue and Characterization (23:41)
  8. Description and Figurative Language (22:59)
  9. Desire, Choice, Consequence (35:15)
  10. Concision (19:45)
  11. More on Figurative Language (20:37)
  12. Symbolism (29:47)
  13. Character-Driven Action (30:50)
  14. World-Building (31:37)
  15. Action and Motion (25:44)
  16. Allegory (13:28)
  17. Slowing Down (30:57)
  18. Abundance (27:12)
  1. First-Person Narration (28:48)
  2. In-Scene, Out-of-Scene (19:02)
  3. Manners and Mannerisms (26:22)
  4. Pacing (29:21)
  5. Convincing Description (18:40)
  6. Symbolism (23:20)
  7. Tim Johnson Part 1 (31:28)
  8. Tim Johnson Part 2 (21:14)
  9. Engaging the Reader’s Judgement (21:44)
  10. Revealing Gestures (25:31)
  11. The Ewells (31:11)
  12. Dialogue As Action (25:40)
  13. Showing and Telling in the Courtroom (22:13)
  14. Manners (Again) (24:27)
  15. Big Ideas (16:49)
  16. Seeing From the Character’s Perspective (27:04)
  17. Reality as a Source of Fiction (24:44)
  1. Scene-Setting and the Inciting Incident (33:25)
  2. Dialogue (22:22)
  3. Travel Writing (23:36)
  4. Narration and Point of View (22:42)
  5. Grammar and Sentence Structure (19:17)
  6. Creating Distinct Voices (15:15)
  7. Some Thoughts About Plot (21:54)
  8. Freytag’s Pyramid (19:43)
  9. Character Development (28:52)
  10. Creating Problems, Solving Problems (34:16)
  11. Managing the Reader’s Attention (20:54)
  12. Choosing to Tell Instead of Show (29:38)
  13. Conversational Dynamics Part 1 (23:00)
  14. Conversational Dynamics Part 2 (18:22)
  15. Some Thoughts About Description (24:10)
  16. From Rising Action to Crisis (24:07)
  17. Disordered Loves, Reordered Loves (30:07)
  1. Setting and Originality (22:21)
  2. Third-Person Close Narration (36:04)
  3. Bayard, Objectivity, Subjectivity (26:21)
  4. Where Did Feechiefolk Come From? (33:57)
  5. The Wilderking Chant (18:31)
  6. Writing In-Scene and Out-of-Scene (33:04)
  7. Incongruity (33:25)
  8. Into the Swamp (30:37)
  9. Among the Feechies (24:59)
  10. Moving Parts (14:54)
  11. Fishing Trip, Feechie Feast (17:35)
  12. Foreshadowing, Expectations (33:33)
  13. Judgment, Motive (31:51)
  14. Single Combat (34:09)
  15. The False Peak (19:36)
  16. The Miner-Scouts (14:30)
  17. Narrative Layers (17:56)
  18. Climax, Falling Action, Resolution (23:06)

  • FAQs

The answer to that is…it depends.

For instance, Jonathan will present a passage of the book, and then analyze it from a writer’s perspective. He’ll provide the immediate context of the quotation, but won’t recap the whole plot of the books at any specific point.

If you’ve read the book at some point in the past and it resonated with you, then Jonathan’s selection of passages and themes in the work will bring the plot to your mind. You should be able to enjoy the course and maybe dip back into chapters that are referenced in specific lessons.

If you are using this course to supplement an English credit, you could (re-)read the book and maybe keep a journal while you watch the videos. Then, complete the Supplemental Writing Exercise. That way you get the benefit of the literary study alongside the creative writing class.

​To keep up with the videos while you read the novel, we provide recommended reading schedules for each of the courses in the Introduction lessons:

The exercises were created to provide a lot of flexibility. This is primarily because everyone has a different learning style, and everyone’s comfort level with writing is varied. We recommend that you read the section of the book under discussion, then watch the lesson video, then attempt the prompt. The writing exercises can be judged on their own terms, according to the age and stage of your student.

All to say, there is no “right” way of doing this. Just figure out what works best for your son or daughter.

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