Simple Question: How do you create necessary background, without getting buried in worldbuilding, character development, and all the rest?

LESSON DESCRIPTION: Select from and adapt the eight flexible modules included in this lesson to plan each writing project to fit YOUR deadlines, YOUR way of writing, and YOUR genre and content needs.

Your purchase includes DRM-free PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats, and your link to the downloadable, printable lesson worksheets.

In LESSON 8: How to Develop Your Personal Writing Project System, you will:

• Do pinpoint-accurate research without getting bogged down in tons of information you’ll never use—let other writers spend months or years digging around for the details of their story before they put a word on paper: You’ll be up and writing in days.
• Learn how to build just the parts of a world or background you need to start…and how to build the rest the right way as you go—worldbuilding is not building your world in such detail that you could live there. It’s building it in the specific details that will make your reader believe she could.
• Use between four and eight steps to custom-create exactly the foundation you need to write your story—the eight story-development modules will focus you on the heart of your story and let you discover depths, conflict, and twists and turns you never suspected you had in you.
• Kill once and for all the dreaded Research Procrastination Syndrome—because, yes, researching, worldbuilding and character creation are a blast, but if you’re a writer, they’re tools to get you to your book, not the quest themselves.

The public version of the course consists of these 29 individual lessons, and downloadable, printable worksheets included in the purchase price, and available from simple-to-type links at the back of each lesson.

STUDENTS SAY:

“Fantasy writer and teacher extraordinaire Holly Lisle (no relation!) earns my undying thanks for her online courses on writing and editing, without which this book might still be languishing in revision Hell.”

–From the Acknowledgements in THE ALCHEMIST OF SOULS, by Anne Lyle

“My newest novel (revised with some of the methods I learned in this course) got contracted by the very best Fantasy-agent in Germany.”

– Katharina Gerlach, Germany

“I’ve been a professional journalist for 20 years… I was hoping to silence the editor. (And) I realized I’d written 5,000 words without going back to check spelling, etc.”

– Max Howard

“I’ve been a journalist for 25 years, and I’ve written fiction (short stories) off and on since childhood. Some even have been published! Taking the course, …I learned to let a story take on its own life and stop trying to force it to become what I originally imagined it might be. That’s incredibly liberating.”

– Kathleen Rice Adams

“It is by far more detailed than I could have ever hoped. It’s not just a collection of tips and tricks; it’s a complex, complete system for getting that damn book done and done right. It’s changed my whole approach to writing but in a way that feels natural, like, ‘why didn’t I think of doing it this way before?’”

– K.T. Appleby

Each of the 29 lessons teaches one or more essential sideways-thinking skills that will allow you to write better fiction, find markets for your work, revise intelligently (and just once per book), sell what you write, and make every book you write better than the last. It includes both commercial publishing and self-publishing tracks: I have many years of experience in both.

HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers is not “how to write A book.”

The course is “How to write books you love for the rest of your life in ANY genres you wish to pursue, get paid for doing it, hit deadlines, crush writer’s block, NEVER run out of ideas, and build a career telling stories you’re proud of to people who love what you do.”

The course is written exclusively for people who want to learn how to make a living from their writing, and my system is built around learning how to THINK sideways, and how to apply sideways-thinking skills to your writing—and while you will write, revise, and submit (or publish) a novel or novella as your course project, if you are unwilling to learn new ways of thinking, you will not benefit from the course.

—Holly Lisle

Each lesson builds on techniques taught in previous lessons.

TO AVOID CONFUSION AND FRUSTRATION, DO THE LESSONS IN ORDER.

How “HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS” Became A Course

In 2008, a group of writers asked me how I’d managed to sell 30 novels to more than a dozen major commercial publishers worldwide, in half a dozen different genres, in a multitude of languages, all under my own name—and how I’d managed to make writing a full-time career with which I’d paid the bills and fed my family for (then) 17 years.

I explained that it wasn’t luck—that I’d developed a system of “thinking sideways” that allowed my to see publishing opportunities other writers missed, and let me switch genres when I needed to, and allowed me to keep selling my work under my own name even in down markets and bad economies.

The writers I answered wanted to learn my system, and in 2008, my first class of 120 students, including journalists, editors, published novelists, a screenwriter, various computer programmers, a few accountants, a couple of doctors, quite a few stay-at-home moms, and many more, went through the private six-month course I built to SHOW them how to do what I did.

Four years and 3000+ private students later, I have closed my classroom (because I’m going back to writing my own novels full-time) and have taken the 29-lesson HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers course public.

The public version of the course consists of these lessons, and downloadable, printable worksheets available from simple-to-type links included in each lesson.

All lessons in this series: