These days, you are besieged by books and online courses purporting to teach you how to write fiction. These are seldom invented by successful fiction writers. Rather, such “courses” are taught by people who believe they have found formulae that, if followed, will result in a best-seller. That the best-seller may be dreck doesn’t matter.

Edith Wharton wrote, “One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the ‘fiction course’ is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms….The trade-wind in fiction undoubtedly drives many beginners along the line of least resistance, and holds them there.”

No course will take you beyond that line. What will do it is fiction itself. Instead of spending $19.95 on something with a title like “How To Write That Novel Of Yours,” spend it on The Red And The Black. Edith Wharton herself teaches you admirably in The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, or The Custom of The Country. Dickens. The James Joyce who wrote Dubliners. The Toni Morrison of Beloved. The Red Badge of Courage. Love in the Time of Cholera. All the Light We Cannot See. Now and then George Eliot. Sometimes W. Somerset Maugham. Very occasionally Hemingway and many, many others, all of which transcend the how-to-write-fiction course simply by being so compelling in the stories they tell, and especially in the ways they are told.

Read those. There lies your course.