Ideally I think it's useful to be familiar with Python and some NLP. Parts of the course can get reasonably in-depth, but we have tried to simplify every as much as possible and I think much of it can be followed without too much prerequisite knowledge.

That being said, as a writer it sounds like you'd be most interested in generative models that generate new text, we do cover that a little in the Question Answering chapter, but otherwise, not so much. Although I don't know your ideas or plans so I can't say for sure what is good/bad for you to focus on.

I do think you should read into transformer models like BERT and GPT, there is a very good free course from HuggingFace who are the 'de-facto framework' for NLP at the moment, that could be useful for you too: https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1/1 (chapter one will introduce everything too, definitely go through that)

With HuggingFace, you can put together a simple T5 or GPT-2 text generation script with a few lines of code