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Length: ~4hrs, 23 lessons

My rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

My one-liner takeaway: You don’t have a compelling story until the pattern of normalcy is broken; something has to happen.

Margaret Atwood is responsible for giving the world The Handmaid’s Tale (now a hit show on Hulu) but also for other novels that force us to pause and think about our own world, despite being a writer of fiction. To successfully create these kinds of universes, she has to strike the balance between something that is too complicated and just complicated enough to be brilliant. For budding writers, she suggests that they study the structures used in classical stories (e.g., Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Arabian Nights, etc) in order to successfully create deviations from them. One example of a deviation is trying out different perspectives of a narrator through trial and error, even asking yourself whether the narrator should know more or less than the characters in the story. In terms of character development, she stresses the importance of keeping the reader engaged. A successful character is one that the reader (and perhaps even you) can’t anticipate the next moves.

She also gives some practical tips on what to think about if you’re interested in reaching a wide audience. The beginning of your story is the most important, and there’s a good chance you won’t know how to write the beginning until you’ve written most of the manuscript. While the reading of your story is linear, the writing process shouldn’t be. When talking about the conclusion of a story, she calls out that unlike in previous centuries, modern audiences are more accepting of open endings rather than having it all tied up in a bow. My favorite part about the course was her explanation of speculative fiction, which takes elements of the present and extends them out to the future. The horrors of the world in The Handmaid’s Tale, she notes, were all trends that she observed at the time of the writing. I hadn’t realized it, but this was a genre that I loved quite a lot (1984, Brave New World, etc) when I was in high school. While I wish I had gotten exposure to her work earlier, but I’m happy I ended the course with a few new books added to my reading list.

If you’d like to hear it directly from Margaret Atwood, check out her course here. As of now there are over 100 instructors to learn from, with more being added every week!

This review is part of a larger series, where I try learning from every single course within the catalog. Find my full list here.