I enjoyed Amy Bloom's teaching style and the way she relayed the message across. It really felt like being with a friend at a coffeeshop, analyzing different parts of books and stories that we've read and commenting on them. It was casual, comfortable, and very informative. The assignments allowed me to experiment and unlock new ways of getting and utilizing inspiration for characters, and for giving my characters a proper and interesting depth.

This course helped sharpen my noticing skills. The suggested reading is immensely helpful. The feedback is invaluable and I will be going back to some of those to transform those exercises into short stories. Thank you so much for the public access to this course! I am indebted to you. A MOOC is truly a life transforming invention, giving people the tools to improve on their skills. I can't imagine life without a MOOC! My goodness!

Amy Bloom makes a student writer feel he or she is the only student in the world. She shares what she has learned and points to excellent models in literature and writing. We learn that writers love to talk to each other about their craft, and, by golly, we're invited right into their circles of conversation. Of course, it's all pre-programmed and produced for a large audience, but it's authentic, friendly, and best of all, it's wise.

Los ejercicios fueron espléndidos. Generalmente juego en mi mente a cambiar las historias que leo o veo en la televisión, así que la tarea de la semana dos me pareció encantadora. También suelo escribir las mismas escenas una y otra vez desde diferentes perspectivas hasta quedarme con una versión en la que entiendo lo que todos están viendo y sintiendo, la última tarea también me gustó mucho. Muchas gracias, aprendí muchísimo.

Whether you are a hobbyist writer or a literature student, whether you dream to publish or keep your writing close to you in your journal - this course will literally "Blow a Soul" in your writing, with the ability of creating characters, whom we find connection with!

Various methods and also experience shared by many seasoned novelists!

Thank you Wesleyan University and Coursera, for providing such a wonderful course!

The course is excellent. It makes invaluable contributions to the subject of creating characters. It is a quite good and illustrative initiation, which opens up ways to learn more from the great masters of literature and to be more attentive to the details that people manifest in real life, since this makes it possible to learn how to make the characters more concrete in the fictions that are created from now on.

I got out of this module exactly what I put into it. While the videos do a reasonably good job of outlining a basic understanding, I found that I wanted more info, especially as concerns POV. For some reason, omniscient 3rd person was a tough concept to grasp. But I've since learned that POV can make or break a story, particularly if you don't know which one you're using and/or keep fluctuating from one to another.

This course was challenging and informative. The ability to speed up and slow down the video lectures is fantastic. These video lectures are jammed packed with information and I often listen to parts again and again to grasp a solid understanding. Without this feature this would become tedious and boring. The lecturers are knowledgeable and the words chosen to explain the content are spot on. Thanks. Loved it.

Absolutely fantastic course. So helpful. I feel I am well on my way to being confident enough to write novels. I will soon be ready to put pen to paper.

Thank you so much to all of the professors, teachers and authors that feature in this course. I am so grateful. Also, a huge thank you to all of my peers who gave me constructive and awesome feedback, I am really pleased.

I can't wait to start this career journey!

I very much enjoyed this course, and found it to be very useful and effective in improving my writing. The format of interviews with different writers iengaging and interesting. The most valuable part was the weekly writing assignments, and the peer reviews. The feedback I received was very useful to me, and I found that giving feedback to others also helped to advance my own insights and understanding.

This course helped a great deal. I can honestly say that a step in knowing how to create a believable character. Also, it helped me realize the difference in the different point of views through which a story can be told, and I discovered my favorite and my weaknesses in it. Safe to say the feedback from the assignments played a big part. Thank you and to all the other learners who sent me feedback.

I've taken numerous Creative Writing courses over the years- in Community College, in a university. I can honestly say that Wesleyan University's Creative Writing Specialization benefitted me more than any other. Amy Bloom is a writer I much admire and a great teacher of all the most important parts of Character development, research, and execution. This course is highly recommended.

This is a really interesting course with fun, challenging assignments. I really enjoyed Amy’s lectures and the interviews with published authors were fantastic too. The course included lots of useful examples from literature. And the course covers more than just superficial characters, unlike some other courses, it really delves into what makes characters and their stories tick.

I learned so much from this course regarding how to create a strong character. I came to realize that there are so many things I can do to pops out my fictional character's personality and that little thing such as the way the character speak, read, or dress really matter to a story. I'm very grateful to Ms Amy Bloom and Coursera to make this course possible.

Amy Bloom covers a very difficult topic of craft of character in her course and she does it really well. The course is very well designed and Amy explains everything in so much detail. My only feedback is that at least few of tools and methods should be explained to students as a beginner will have an extremely difficult time in creating characters.

I found Amy's information very helpful in learning how to create a character and write from different Points of Views. I think the assignments needed more clarification as far as what the expectations are. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, Amy. I bought The Art of the Character and one of your books to read to help me understand how you write.

It was a pleasure to learn from exceptional author, Amy Bloom, every detail about the crafting of characters. I believed I had some doubts when it came down to create my characters, but this course has given them other dimension in my mind.

So far, this and the Craft of Plot have been excellent courses that I'd highly recommend.

Thank you so much!

Excellent On-line Course in Creative Writing developing Character. Amy Bloom was an exceptional Instructor, both in her lesson planning and video lectures and interviews, as well as in her caring monitoring of the class involvement, progress and questions. Thank you, Amy, for offering us your knowledge in such an interesting and engaging form!

Amy Bloom is everything you will want in teacher. Character was never known until I started this course. Who is the character in the story, what quirks, beliefs, normal or abnormal behaviour do the show? I learnt a lot from this course and keep renewing my knowledge when ever \i fell the need to.

It was fun and enjoyable. Thank you Amy.

Amy Bloom is such a caring, conscientious, nurturing teacher, who addresses the class (via video camera) as if only speaking to you. There's a kind of intimacy to her teaching style, and her sincerity and expertise at expressing concepts and examples of character craft allowed her teachings to truly "seat" in my mind. Thank you, Amy.

it's been hard for me at the beginning then I started writing real characters so easily. I learned a lot from this course and from the stories my peers have written. Thank you so much.

I just have a comment about the second assignment, the description wasn't clear enough so, it'll be nice if you can edit it a little bit.

Amy Bloom has real depth of insight into what makes a character stand out. She enjoys earthy details that hook us into a person's foibles (viz her experience with the noir genre). That all comes out in great lectures in this course. See my review on plot for the issues with the vagaries of the peer review process here.

The course really helped me to understand the basics that we usually forget when we write -THE CHARACTERS. We focus on the plotting and the events so much that we end up neglecting the minute details about the character which makes a huge difference on the story. The course really helped me with it. Thank you coursera.

The course was great. I really liked the way the teacher explained about the characters, it was really helpful. Also, I like the fact she suggested a lot of books to read about characters.

Last, but not least the assignments to do were really interesting. I suggest this course to anybody who is interesting in writing.

Taking the Creative Writing Specialization has been a tasking but fulfilling journey. Through the well-tailored classes and videos, I have come to see the strength and weaknesses in my writing. I now am more aware of the need to balance these two to make my art better. It has been an exciting learning experience!