Saturdays, Sept. 14th - Oct. 26th (no class Oct. 5th) | How do you know if your novel premise is a good one? Are you querying your book but facing endless rejection? Every day, writers come to me with stories full of logic holes, or a lack of stakes, emotion, and suspense. I can relate. When I wrote my first novel, I relied on instinct, smart beta readers, and sheer will. What took five years could have been accomplished in two. If only I had taken a class like this!
Whether you have a first draft of a novel or just a few pages and the germ of an idea, you need to know if your premise is compelling before you start querying. In this workshop, we will focus on analyzing and planning to get the most juice out of your story, up the stakes, and add compelling surprises like plot twists and reveals.
To get there, we will be asking the hard, deep questions that will take your story from an interesting possibility to a well-reasoned, thoroughly plotted story readers won’t put down. Each week, we will work on filling out planners, beat sheets, and studying mentor texts to learn from the greats. By the end, you should have a completed plan that will enable you to take the amazing world in your head (or already written) into the real world of publishing deals and eager readers.
We will use the beat sheet plotting tool in Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, so please have a copy before the first class. You don't need to read the whole thing in advance, but it will save time if you use the book to identify your genre.
This workshop is probably best for single point-of-view fiction, but it could be any category from middle grade, young adult, to adult. Writers of fantasy, speculative fiction, or any story with detailed world-building should find this workshop especially helpful. It’s also the perfect prep for NaNoWriMo!
Students who register for this class will receive a special discount for the upcoming class Let's NaNoWriMo! with Lisa Lerner.
Please note that there is no class on Saturday, October 5th.