My Experience with the James Patterson MasterClass (Part I)

Evening Friends!

One light housekeeping note: I think our regular Monday updates will now be posted in the evening, as opposed to during the day like I’d planned. I’ve recently started a new job (yay!), however, this puts me doing most of my writing at night (meh…). Such is life.

Now that that’s taken care of, on to today’s post!

Over the last few months I’ve taken the James Patterson writing course offered by MasterClass.

What I’d like to talk about today are my initial impressions from the class itself. In the next post I’ll be highlighting which specific lessons I found the most beneficial.

First, a little background information for those not familiar with the course:

There he is!

Class Title: James Patterson Teaches Writing (MasterClass)**

Duration: 22 online lessons that can be completed at your own pace. Lesson lengths varied, on average no longer than 15 minutes. 

Cost: $$ 

(i.e. – Not as expensive as some writing courses I’ve seen out there, but not super cheap or free.)

Materials Provided: A PDF lesson plan that accompanied each module, along with homework assignments that stemmed into the following lessons. Examples of basic and detailed story outlines based on one of James Patterson’s published novels.

Extra Perks: “Office Hours”. A separate webpage where students can submit questions and samples of their homework assignments for feedback. (Now, does Mr. Patterson have time to answer each one individually, no, but there are many that he has answered and you can watch his videoed responses.)

Community Facebook Page: A place to bounce ideas off of other students who are also taking the class, also to hear about other writers' experiences with their work, forays into publishing, etc. 

Initial Impression: Putting all aspects of writing instruction aside for a moment, I just have to say that I loved the overall format of this class! Each lesson was like having a casual conversation with James Patterson while he covered whichever topic was assigned to that particular lesson. The lessons have a very relaxed feel to them, yet at the same time you are able to absorb so much information from a writing professional who has been working in the publishing world for decades.

The lessons themselves are set up in an easy-to-follow order, starting with a basic introduction and travelling through Patterson’s experiences as a beginning writer, nourishing raw ideas, developing plotting/outlining methods, becoming published, publicity, working with co-authors, working with Hollywood, and so on. You can complete the homework assignments after each lesson, however, I chose to watch all 22 videos through once and then go back to each lesson to complete the assignments.

I decided on this approach to the course because:

1)      Once you pay for the class, you can watch the videos as many times as you’d like. So, why not? 

2)      It helped me pick up on information that I might have missed the first time around.

How you want to complete the course is entirely up to you. For me, this was an added benefit to the format MasterClass has in place.

Below I’ve included one of the advertising trailers for the class, to give everyone an idea of how the lessons tend to flow:

Stay tuned for Part II next week!

**This blog post was written with permission from MasterClass. Any opinions stated about the James Patterson writing course and co-author competition are my own and not to be attributed to MasterClass or to Mr. Patterson.**