So you're writing a novel. Maybe you've been working on it for a while, or even have hundreds of pages of material—but as any good writer knows, many pages do not, necessarily, a completed novel make. If your story feels unmanageable, you're at the perfect stage to step back, take a bird's-eye view of it, and reevaluate. This one-day novel-structuring intensive is for anyone who has a pretty good sense of—at least—their novel’s beginning, rising action, and climactic moments. (You needn’t have a clear idea of your ending. This class can help with that!)
We'll start by reviewing existing structural forms—e.g. the hero's journey, the love story (both comic and tragic), the bildungsroman. We'll talk about your work, figure out what archetypal narrative tropes you're working with, and use them to help build a strong foundation for your project. We'll discuss chronology: when and how to reveal essential information—and how to determine what information is essential in the first place! Finally, we'll spend some time coming up with our own detailed outlines, which will help us work our novels into a manageable form, going forward.
A student of this course can expect to walk away with a sense of the archetypal story tropes she’s working with; a concrete, detailed, workable outline of her novel; and a clarified, bird’s-eye view of her story.