16-Week Novel Writing Intensive

Turn your novel writing dream into reality. Across 16 weeks, you’ll draft your novel at your own pace. You’ll submit up to 5,000 words each Tuesday for insightful feedback from me and fellow students, with support throughout from extensive craft resources and a community of fellow novelists. No matter which genre you’re writing in, if you’re ready to write your novel, you’ve come to the right place.

This course embraces the messy, iterative process of writing a novel, encouraging you to revisit and refine your work whenever inspiration strikes. Don’t worry about making “false starts” or needing to revise early chapters as you learn—most writers do!

There’s no pressure to follow a strict formula or write chronologically. Whether you’re pausing to research or jumping to different sections of your novel, you’ll find a supportive community that values both creativity and flexibility.

Each week, you’ll get a new in-depth craft lecture. These lectures cover essential novel-writing concepts for writers at all experience levels. In addition to these lectures, you’ll have access to bonus audio content on the craft of novel writing, as well as thought-provoking questions designed to deepen your understanding of novel writing. Whether you’re a planner working from an outline or prefer to discover the story as you go, trust that we’ll guide you with a solid understanding of traditional novel structure.

I will provide inline comments through Track Changes, plus sometimes audio, on your entire assignment each week. With detailed feedback on every word you submit and peer support throughout, you’ll gain new insights, refine your vision, and grow as a writer.

By the end of this course, you’ll have not only a substantial draft, but also a fresh perspective on your work and the writing process. Get ready to surprise yourself!

Who This Course is For: 

Whether you’ve written a novel before or not, and whatever genre you write, you’re welcome to join us! You may only have a vague idea of what you want to write, or you may have it all laid out in detail—you’re not forced into a one-size-fits-all formula.

You will be divided up into feedback groups of around three. You’ll commit to providing feedback on assignments from your student group each week. 

The course all takes place on your schedule within the weekly deadlines, so there are no Zoom meetings.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will learn to: 

• Develop expertise in composing loglines and outlines.
• Write an engaging novel that delivers on your genre’s expectations.
• Create a compelling protagonist with a transformative arc dramatizing a theme that matters to you.
• Organize a winning plot structure.
• Wow readers with an excellent prose style that you may apply more fully in later drafts.
• Make characters believable, with unique voices and subtext.
• Gain more insight into writing by giving thoughtful feedback to other students.
• Get your book out to the public.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Outline, sketch, draft, research and revise your novel in the timing that your process requires.
• Draft as much of a novel as is comfortable during sixteen weeks, up to and including finishing the whole thing.
• Submit up to 5,000 words each week for our responses and suggestions.

Weekly Syllabus

Each week I will provide you with thought-provoking questions for you to consider. They are designed to deepen your understanding of novel writing. By considering these, you’ll gain new insights, refine your vision, and grow as a writer. Below you’ll find the questions for Week One to give you an example of what to expect each week.  

Week One: You and Audience, Protagonist and Antagonist

We’ll discuss how an antagonist who is a catalyst for the transformation of the protagonist, basic plot structure, the tense, the hook, scene one.

Week One Questions:

1. Is the protagonist’s thwarted goal clear and are we worried about it?

2. If you’re written it yet — Does the very beginning hook the reader by promising an intriguing story to come? Does it create a mystery the reader wants to solve? Does it establish that the narrator is interesting, uses compelling language, provides exciting details, and unique characters that we care about? Is it action, ideally, or perhaps a startlingly wonderful statement by or about a fascinating character?

3. Do you avoid anchoring the beginning by simply having a character looking out the window reflecting, riding a car thinking about where she’s going or her past, looking in the mirror and describing herself? And then launching right away into expository or backstory, summing up things that happened over a long period of time? That’s not how hooks work. You have to have time to earn expository and backstory.

4. Do you know what you want to say, yet?

5. What kind of experience do you want to have while writing it?

6. Is there anything you are concerned that may be different about your vision? Anything you feel we won’t understand and might try to change, though you’re confident about what you want to do?

7. Is the protagonist’s thwarted goal clear and are we worried about it?

8. Can this story be told in detailed scenes showing action after action in a contained moment rather than summing up a period of time using expository prose?

Assignment: Turn in up to 5000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. You’re welcome to turn in your first scene, with the understanding that the hook is what writers return to most to rewrite and rewrite. At any point in the course, you can turn in your new version of the first scene as part of your 5000 words.

Week Two: Logline, Plot Structure, and POV

We’ll cover how to construct a screenplay-like logline to focus your story, a wide variety of plot structures, types of POVs, and expository prose compared to exposition and to narrative format.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.  

Week Three: Wants VS Needs, Stakes, Compelling Active Protagonist

This week is all about action, goals, flaws, wants VS needs, conventions, stakes, compelling qualities, not being boring.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. When commenting, honestly tell us how compelling the protagonist is to you or see if you can imagine how compelling it would be to the intended audience.

Week Four: Scene Structure, Theme, Adverbs, Cliches

This week’s lecture materials discuss scene structure, expository writing, a deeper look at theme, adverbs, and cliches. 

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Five: Entertainment, Unreliable Narrator, Inciting Incident

We’ll discuss muscularizing your prose, why the unreliable narrator is always first person POV, being unreliable specifically to the reader, and how the inciting incident is the last thing that technically can be deus ex machina.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Six: Your Voice, Door of No Return

Learn about being true to your vision, questioning Western default structure, cadence, caesura, and how the character irrevocably takes the plunge into the new world.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. When commenting, see if you can characterize the voice of the author.

Week Seven: Motifs, Character Facets, First Pinch Point

We’ll learn about how characters interact with different people, situations, settings, moods, etc. that bring out completely different aspects of character and ways of dialoging. We’ll also discuss the poetic quality of repeated motifs that subtly remind readers of the progression of the theme.

Assignment:  Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you, paying particular attention to showing your characters speaking completely differently in various situations to different people. Pay attention this week to how differently you behave around various people, whether online or in person.

Week Eight: Foreshadowing, Twists, Believability, Midpoint

We’ll discuss how to build suspense, characters we care about, with high stakes, amazing settings, and realistic dialogue. You’ll also learn how the protagonist “looks in the mirror” during the midpoint and has a major realization that leads to new commitment.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you, and when commenting on assignments, let us know what you feel will be coming later, due to the foreshadowing in the manuscript.

Week Nine: Prose Perfection, Second Pinch Point

This week is all about metaphors, punctuation, cliches, sentence structure, and how the antagonist can exert power once again.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. Pay attention all week to figurative language you use every day in speech or writing.

Week Ten: Unique Speech and Subtext

We’ll look at how to avoid overused gestures and words, and  how to keep the closeness of the POV consistent.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. Notice all week how you speak by hints, misdirection, feeling people out, oblique suggestion, humor, lying, hiding, passive aggressive references, etc. as you look for the subtext. When you comment on assignments, let us know if you can tell which character is speaking by their unique patterns.

Week Eleven: Chiarascuro, Micro-Obstacles VS Flow

This week, we’ll focus on challenging characters’ stereotypes, imagining the scene as a photo, minor character arcs, and characters holding back and then letting go.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Twelve: Return to Theme, Paragraph, Sentence

We’ll discuss how to evaluate if your theme is preachy, arrogant, naïve, or predictable. You’ll learn how to cut down extraneous words, vary sentence structure, and avoid comma splices. 

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Thirteen: Flashbacks, Red Herrings, MacGuffin, Lion

You’ll discover the best way to construct flashbacks, how not to sidetrack readers, and dramatizing the goal with a tangible object. I will also offer craft book recommendations for further learning. 

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. When commenting, let us know who you think is the mystery person, if there are any red herrings. 

Week Fourteen: Crisis and Climax, Literary Considerations

We’ll discuss how the protagonist must die to the old ways and test the new resolve. There will be an optional reading and discussion of some literary short stories, and a variety of additional forms, such as the cell phone novel and linked prose poetry.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Fifteen: Series, Publication, Promotion

This week is all about publishing and how to get your work out into the world. We’ll discuss transmedia, reviewing, self-publishing, submissions, creation, marketing, formatting, audiobooks, screenwriting, and helpful websites. 

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you.

Week Sixteen: Ending and Revision

During our last week, we’ll discuss how the resolution mirrors the beginning, and how to tackle a major revision process, some tools to help polish, and beta readers.

Assignment: Turn in up to 5,000 words of whatever material is most useful to you. If you haven’t finished the novel, you can sketch out what happens in the rest of it. Let us know what kinds of revision changes you’ll be making.

$995.00Enroll Now