Each session includes reading assignments, a written lecture, creative exercises to further your learning, discussion questions, and a writing assignment to turn in for personalized feedback from your instructor.
Session One: Death Overhanging
Session Two: Birth (The LOCK Method)
Session Three: Middle Age
Session Four: Death Overhanging Redux
Session Five: Emotional Conflict
Session Six: Withholding, Misdirection, and the Power of Scene and Sequel
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
Required Reading
Student Testimonials
Meet the instructor
G. Miki Hayden
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.