HOW TO GET YOUR YA NOVEL OFF THE GROUND
Course Description, Structure, and Expectations
WELCOME!!!
I'm glad to have you in this class and I'm excited to learn about your stories as we go through creating the foundation you'll need to see your project through.
INTRODUCTION
Hi, and welcome to How To Get Your YA Novel Off The Ground.
A note before we begin: While this class is framed around Young Adult literature, the techniques and skills we’ll deal with over the next eight weeks work just as well for adult literary and genre fiction of all types , so whether your planning to write the next Life of Pi, the next Cujo, or the next Hunger Games, what we do here will be relevant and helpful. Also, I think it’s important to note that this class will be helpful to those who’ve already begun writing their stories, too. Most of us don’t take the time before writing to fully sculpt our ideas -- we just want words on the page, and I include myself in this -- so this class is also for those who’re 20,000 words deep in their story and are just now realizing that they’re off track and they don’t know how or why.
So, to recap: If you’re just beginning with an idea you want to develop, or if you’ve got 20,000-plus words in a manuscript that just doesn’t seem to be working, this class is for you, young adult or no.
A LITTLE ABOUT ME:
First and foremost, I’m not special. I wasn’t “born to do this” and I don’t have any special training. I don’t have an MFA and I’ve never been to school to learn how to write long-form fiction. Everything I’ve learned I’ve learned from trial and error, from watching those who are better than me, from reading the work of others critically, and from making mistake after mistake but also from taking the time after each mistake to figure out where I went wrong.
When I was a teenager I liked to write, and I always fancied myself a writer though I didn’t begin writing in earnest until I was 37 years old. I was hitting middle-age and I had to face the fact that I would have to actually write something or I would have to stop thinking of myself as a writer.
I wrote my first manuscript that year -- an adult literary fiction -- and it was terrible (though I didn’t think so at the time). It was roundly rejected by agents of all stripes. After that experience, I took some time to review what I’d done and I asked questions of those who had read it and I learned. Then I wrote another one which was differently terrible and I repeated the process.
Then I wrote a third which was objectively good, but not marketable, and a fourth which was even better but was rejected due to market saturation in the genre. My fifth manuscript was my first YA story. It was the manuscript that eventually became my debut novel, STRANGE DAYS. I queried it, and was offered representation by an agent at a reputable small New York agency who then worked with me to make some significant changes to the manuscript in order to make it saleable.
Again, I learned from trial and error. I learned by listening and reading. But mostly I learned by writing, and this class is developed from those experiences so that you won’t necessarily have to write four manuscripts before you write one that’s saleable.
When my agent took me on, he told me that, while my manuscript needed a lot of work, it held the key elements that make for a saleable manuscript:
“Plot,” he told me, “Can be fixed. Idea, Character, and Voice are much harder to repair.”
Together, we fixed the plot, and he sold it to Putnam, fulfilling a lifelong dream of seeing my book on the shelves at bookstores and libraries.
So since Idea, Character, and Voice are the things which carry a story -- and essentially they’re the things that will dictate your plot anyway -- it’s on them that this class will focus.
WHAT THIS CLASS WILL REQUIRE:
Suggested Readings:
There are things that are best coming from me, and then there are things that others have said and done better than I ever could. One of those things is step-by-step instructions on plotting a novel. For this, I suggest reading Save The Cat! Writes a Novel by Jennifer Brody. It's available in bookstores, at the library, and on Amazon, and I'll be referencing it when we get to discussing plot structure and beats.
If you choose not to purchase or borrow a copy, that's fine. The main points will be summarized here and the beat-sheet that we'll be using is based on its ideas. If you do get a copy, you should read at least up until page 78 before week 6 of the class.
Also, if you haven’t read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling, or Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, I suggest you become familiar with them -- I’ll be using them as common exemplars throughout the class. If you don’t want to read them, that’s totally fine. I’ve chosen them specifically because the movie adaptations for each of them was well-done and hews closely to the idea, character, and voice of the book on which it was based. Watch the movies instead if you’d like -- that will be enough for the purposes of this class.
I’ll also be using my own novel, Strange Days, as an exemplar, so if you wanted to pick up a copy of it, that would certainly be acceptable. There’s no movie yet, but maybe someday….
You also may want to pick up a copy of Kim Hudson's The Virgin's Promise as we'll be referring to it a lot in weeks 5 and 6.
I will, occasionally, ask that you read pages from other things that are specific to the lesson for that week, but they will not require purchase.
The Structure of the Class:
The main product of this class is going to be something called a Story Bible.
The Story Bible is a trade tool that screenwriter's use, and I've adapted the basic idea for use with long-form fiction. A screenplay is so limited by format and cinematic constraints, that most of what you need for a script never appears in it. All the background ideas, the story line, the character arcs, the character biographies, the settings, the motivations -- everything that makes the story the story has to be written down first even though only the barest essentials are lifted to create the script. If a story bible is complete and effective, the script that is traced from it efficiently expresses all the information needed for the whole story.
It works for novels, too.
I stole the Story Bible idea from my wife who's a screenwriter and adapted it for novel-writing. It really helps.
Building your story bible is a process. Each week of this class is focused on building out an element of the bible while focusing on one of the three essential elements for a readable (and saleable) manuscript -- Idea, Character, and Voice:
At the end of the class, you will have a bible, a story outline, tips on how to write a winning first 50 pages, an elevator pitch that you can use, and the benefit of a one-hour one-on-one consultation about your story.
ASSIGNMENTS:
Over the course of 7 weeks, we will complete your story-bible and get your story launched.
Each week, there will be a written assignment where I’ll ask you to apply what we’ve discussed in the class, and then we will refine what you’ve written and flesh it out so that it becomes an element of your story bible.