It's one thing to have a great idea for a story - and it's quite another to put that into brilliant and engaging text that hooks your readers and makes publishers pay attention. For beginner or even intermediate writers, the amount of knowledge needed to write to a publishable standard can seem overwhelming.

This course deletes the overwhelm by providing a complete walk-through of the core techniques of both writing and structuring stories as you build your own story from scratch.

Build a Story Step-By-Step as You Learn the Techniques of Masterful Fiction Writing

• Create believable characters

• Write realistic dialogue and description

• Choose the right point of view and tense

• Master the principle of "show don't tell"

• Construct scenes and plot structures as you build your own story

• Radically improve any existing story or manuscript you've been working on

Everything You Need to Write Stories That Publishers Want to Read

Through this course you will learn the essentials of story creation so you can feel confident building stories from scratch. You will also learn the core writing techniques that all fiction and creative non-fiction authors need if they want to get the attention of publishers and readers. This course provides the complete skillset needed to write publishable fiction and creative non-fiction.

How can I say that with confidence? Simply because every topic covered has emerged from the challenges I've seen writers face in my work as an editor and author coach. As I saw the same few issues coming up again and again I began referring writers to books and courses that covered these topics. And as the list of referrals grew longer I wished I had just one source that would teach writers everything. But there wasn’t, so I created it myself.

CONTENTS AND OVERVIEW

This is your all-in-one, basic to intermediate course for learning the techniques of story planning and writing.

1. We start with the basics of story development so you fully understand how stories are built up from the simplest ideas. Once you know the patterns and shapes of stories you'll start seeing them everywhere. Publishers can see immediately if your work isn't well structured, so this information is critical for your story's success.

2. While discussing story development you'll be doing practical exercises to either start a new story or go deeper on a short story, novel or memoir you are already working on. This is your class project.

3. Then we get into the actual writing technique and cover the core disciplines:

• Character building

• Dialogue

• Tense and point of view

• Showing vs telling

• Description

4. And finally, we go back to story structure and cover scene building and basic plot construction. Once that's done you'll be able to put the finishing touches to your class project.

Who this course is for

While this course is aimed at novice writers of short stories and novels it’s also the perfect fundamental skills course for authors working on crossover forms such as memoir and creative nonfiction. All the skills used in structuring and writing fiction are directly applicable to true-life stories, histories, personal essays and any other form that uses the techniques of fiction to tell a story based on real life. Many of the topics contain specific guidelines for adapting the material to memoir and creative nonfiction.

Course delivery

This course includes 41 lectures and exercises (3:54 hours of video learning) plus a comprehensive Course Notes PDF. Each topic ends with an exercise to help you build your own story or improve an existing work.

At the end of this course, you will be able to create new stories from scratch, write powerful, engaging prose using the core skills of fiction writing, and confidently continue writing the short story, novel or memoir you began working on in the exercises.