Writer’s Craft I: How to Write and Sell a Novel

This class helps writers who have the beginnings of a novel or only just the spark of an idea, whose minds are filled with settings, scenes, conflict and characters every waking moment and need a guide or plan before forging ahead into their fictional world.

E. L. Doctorow's famous quote, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way," is popular fuel for novel-writing motivation. While it is true that intuition can keep some writers going from start to finish, many others require a map, GPS and road signs to help them along the way. Spontaneously driving off into the dark may seem carefree and creative, but you may not end up where you intended to go. The same thing goes in writing. The class "Outlining the Novel" teaches you how to create and use a quality map showing all the twists and turns and points of interest on your journey to a finished novel.

This self directed online course will guide you from idea to an outline that shows what each chapter should include. We will discuss the overall theme that powers your story, character creation and development, conflict and climax, including back story effectively, exploring setting, choosing the correct point of view(s) and the overall narrative arc. The explanation and exploration of these and other characteristics of the story will allow you to create an outline that works.

In some modules, we will work with a four-stage outline drafted by a best-selling novelist. In others, we will explore how the outline changes and evolves during the developmental process and how this evolution leads to a stronger storyline. We will also focus on additional outline revisions and more technique options available to the planning writer.

Both beginners and more experienced novel writers, left brain and right brain creators and those writing in all literary and commercial genres can find value in this "Outlining the Hubble" course

Anyone who turns past the title page of your book – be they editors, agents, publishers or readers – begin to judge the quality of your book in the first couple of pages. Think back to the last book you read. How many paragraphs did you read before you decided if it was a "put back on the shelf or lend to a friend" book or a "cancel your date and order take-out" book? Putting so much emphasis on the beginning of the book may not seem fair and can lead to incorrect judgments about books that may start slowly but ramp up to a very thrilling experience as page turn.

How much time you give the book to grab your attention – five paragraphs, five pages or five chapters – depends on many factors including your own personal patience levels. If you consider how you judge a book, and get feedback from others about how they decide to stop or read on, you can use this information to think about your own novel and see how effective it is at enticing the reader to continue. Not only is an interesting beginning important to engage readers, but its efficacy speaks directly to the structure and narrative of the rest of the novel's plot. If you have a problem in the first five pages, there is a good chance that the following pages could be affected similarly.