Each session includes required reading, a written lecture, creative exercise to further your learning, and a writing assignment to turn in for personalized feedback from your instructor.
Session One: Getting Started
Session Two: Character Building
Session Three: Characterization & Point of View
Session Four: Dialogue
Session Five: Plot
Session Six: Polishing Your Prose
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
Required Reading
Meet the instructors
Jack Adler
Jack Adler has been a full time freelance writer since 1974, drawing upon his previous business experience for his writing specialties: travel, health, recreation and leisure articles. A full time job as feature editor of Travel Weekly helped lead Jack to becoming a columnist, on a freelance basis, for the travel section of the Los Angeles Times for 15 years; he wrote two columns: Consumer Report and Bargain Corner. He has also been a columnist for Westways and Cruise Travel magazines, West Coast Bureau Chief for Travel Trade, and a columnist/editorial writer for Better Business Traveling. Currently, he is the leader of the travel bulletin board for Aantares.
Jack’s most recent book, Make Steady Money As A Travel Writer-Without Traveling was published in April 2009. His other published books include Splendid Seniors: Great Lives/Great Deeds, Consumer’s Guide to Travel, Exploring Historic California, Travel Safety: Security At Home & Abroad (co-authored), Companion Guide to Southern India, and There’s a Bullet Hole in Your Window, a nonfiction collection of his own travel experiences. Jack has recently had several novels published, including Ditsy and Champion and a historical trilogy, Parthian Retreat, Seres Sanctuary, and Parthian Karma. Jack also has had several e-books published: How to Break in as a Travel Writer and two novels, Blind Gods and A Savage Duty. Other novels include a travel adventure series: City Havoc, The Impresario of Terror, Irish Spring, The Rage of Kali, and The Sperm Farm.
Jack’s magazine credits include Let’s Live, Shape, Venture, Friendly Exchange, Transitions Abroad, Gentlemen, Off Duty, Home & Away, Discovery, Cruise Travel, Journey and Rice, among others. Jack also developed the Essentials of Travel Writing workshop for Writers Online Workshops.
Speaker Name
G. Miki Hayden’s two latest novels are Rescued and Re-Live, out in 2023, both literary fiction with strong plot and character elements and powerful openings. Hayden also recently sold four novels for electronic serialization, while her first novel in print, Pacific Empire (an alternate history), won a rave in the NYTimes and was on that paper’s Summer Reading List. The sequel, New Pacific, was in print in 2004. Other novels of Hayden’s in print are By Reason of Insanity (a mystery), Question Woman & Howling Sky (a post-apocalyptic novel set in the West), Strings (a middle-grade fantasy), and The Heroine’s Journey (a YA fantasy set in the Middle Ages and our own time). She has had many short stories published, including in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen and in three Mystery Writers of America anthologies (winning an Edgar for one). She has also published in science fiction and romance genres. Miki has two writing instructionals in print—Writing the Mystery in its third edition and The Naked Writer, a style guide, also in its third edition. She has taught at Writer’s DigestUniversity online for more than twenty years.
