Character-Driven: How to Write the Role of a Lifetime

Jon James Miller

SEPTEMBER, 19  |  4:00 PM ET

Learn the process of creating exciting and multi-faceted characters who will attract film industry professionals and jumpstart your writing career.

Mastering Flashbacks: Weave the Past Seamlessly into Your Present

Tiffany Yates Martin

OCTOBER, 3  |  1:00 PM ET

Learn how to avoid flashback faux pas to let your readers glance backward even as you keep the story moving forward.

Agent One-on-One: First 10 Pages Boot Camp

The Talcott Notch Literary Agency

OCTOBER 10–OCTOBER 13, 2024

In this invaluable event, you'll get to work with an agent to review and refine the first ten pages of your novel or non-fiction book.

Description: Bring Your Writing to Life

Sharon Short

Learn how to effectively use descriptive techniques to elevate your writing into an immersive reading experience for your readers, including agents and editors.

Point of View: Finding The Heart of Your Story

Sharon Short

Learn the nuances of POV and how to avoid POV pitfalls, how time is an essential part of POV, how POV intersects with character, how to choose the right POV for each story, and how to handle unusual or tricky POVs.

Creativity and Expression

G. Miki Hayden

When you take this online course, you’ll explore creative writing topics and learn how descriptive writing can breathe life into your characters, setting, and plot. Stretch your imagination, develop your creative writing skills, and express your creativity.

Setting: Create a Vivid Story World

Sharon Short

Learn how to world build in any genre, research setting, use setting to define character and drive plot, and discover techniques for weaving setting into other creative writing craft elements such as theme and voice.

Voice: The Personality of Writing

Sharon Short

In this course, examples of voice from literature, music, and art will deepen your understanding of and appreciation for voice. You will explore all these elements, experiment with them, and emerge with a stronger voice for your writing projects, making them memorable and engaging for readers.

Character Development: Creating Memorable Characters

Sharon Short

Learn how to create believable fiction characters and construct scenes with emotional depth and range. You'll discover character development techniques and tips along with practical advice for weaving emotion into scenes

Write Great Dialogue

Sharon Short

Dialogue can be one of the most interesting parts of a book to read, but only if it is done right. Sharpen your writing skills and challenge yourself to craft engaging, yet believable dialogue that will keep your readers interested.

Research for Writers

Sharon Short

In this online writing course, you will learn how to manage your research time and effort, and even become comfortable with it. You’ll learn how to find resources, streamline the process, and organize results.

Outlining Your Novel

G. Miki Hayden

Writers often look upon outlines with fear and trembling. But when properly understood and correctly used, the outline is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer's arsenal. In this course, you will learn how to write an outline as you explore what type of outline is right for you, brainstorm plot ideas, and discover your characters.

21 Days to Your Novel Outline and Synopsis

Bryan Young

This course is designed to help you understand how to craft a winning premise, how to outline your novel, and then how to take both of those things and assemble a synopsis that will act as a guide for you to write your novel and sell it.

Build Your Novel Scene by Scene

Mark Spencer

If you want to learn how to write a story, this is the course for you. Get the impetus, the guidance, the support, and the deadline you need to finally stop talking, start writing, and, ultimately, complete that novel you always said you wanted to write.

12 Weeks to a First Draft

Mark Spencer | Terri Valentine | G. Miki Hayden | John DeChancie

Dive into the world of writing and learn all 12 steps needed to complete a first draft. In this writing course you will tackle the steps to writing a book, learn effective writing techniques along the way, and of course, begin writing your first draft.

The Novel Opening

G. Miki Hayden

How can you produce an infallible story opening? Action, voice, an immediate interest in the characters, and a hook that pulls in the reader and which is designed around your particular genre.

21 Days to Your Screenplay Treatment

Bryan Young

Learn how to create an electrifying treatment step by step! By the end of this workshop, you will have a strong treatment and a solid log line for your screenplay that has been vetted by an industry professional.

The Nitty Gritty of Spec Scripts: Writing Strong Action and Dialogue

Dave Trottier

This one-week intensive course focuses on the specifics of writing compelling action (description) and dialogue. At the end of this course, your expert instructor, Dave Trottier, will evaluate five pages of your spec script.

Story Development and Outlining

Lynn Grant Beck

This course will examine plotting a screenplay from premise to story. You'll learn how to take your screenplay from the early stages of building an idea to a full story, ways to structure the story to keep tension and investment high, and strategies to build not only structure but texture in the world of your film.

Writing and Producing the Short Film

Rebecca Norris Resnick

With successful short film examples to watch and study, as well as real-world advice from the low-budget filmmaking trenches, this 4-week class will lead you through the process of writing a short film you can produce on a budget, as well as touch on the pre-production, production, and post-production process.

Writing the Series Bible: Developing Your TV Series

Lynn Grant Beck

A strong series bible is a crucial sales tool for your series. This course will help you get your TV series ready for an executive by developing your series premise, honing your pilot, and writing your series bible.