The Novel Opening

G. MIKI HAYDEN

The Novel Opening

G. MIKI HAYDEN

$399.99


01/16/2025 - 02/27/2025

Enroll Now

While a sharp query goes a long way to inviting in the agent and editor, even that won’t pique their curiosity if they skip ahead to the novel start and the pages don’t deliver. 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. While what works will optimize certain invariable elements, the presentation and emphasis will be completely unique to the work you’re writing.

$399.99


01/16/2025 - 02/27/2025

Enroll Now

While a sharp query goes a long way to inviting in the agent and editor, even that won’t pique their curiosity if they skip ahead to the novel start and the pages don’t deliver. 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. While what works will optimize certain invariable elements, the presentation and emphasis will be completely unique to the work you’re writing.

Course details

Course outline

Each week of this course includes a written lecture, recommended reading, creative exercises, discussion questions, supplemental material, and a writing assignment to be submitted for instructor feedback.

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 Digest University online for more than twenty years.