Each session includes a written lecture and a writing assignment to turn in for personalized feedback from your instructor.
Session One: The Teenage Perspective
Session Two: Say What?: Developing Dialogue
Session Three: Love, Angst, Hate: Exploring Emotions
Session Four: Plotting the Plot, Setting the Setting
Session Five: Charting Your Novel: Beginnings and Endings
Session Six: Charting Your Novel, Part II: Stuck in the Middle
Session Seven: Become Your Own Editor
Session Eight: Querying, Submitting, and Publishing, Oh, My!
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
Meet the instructor
Holly Alder
Holly Alder graduated from Northwestern University with an Education/ English double major and an emphasis in children’s literature. She also acquired an M.Ed. from National College of Education in elementary teaching, with an emphasis in grade school art. She taught writing and literature at Principia College for ten years, including freshman English, writing, and children’s literature and writing.
Holly taught writing for five more years at the University of Cincinnati while picking up an M.A. in psychology, and had various jobs in that field, but never found one she could stomach for long. She then accepted the position of manager of the children’s department of one of the first Barnes & Noble superstores, where she has been for fifteen more years, starving, but happily collecting children’s books, teaching children’s crafts, and writing.
Holly has written five children’s plays, three of which were produced, one published, and one of which won an honor award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. She has two children’s craft books published by F&W Publications. She is presently working on a middle-grade reader about the ghost who inhabited the house she grew up in, and a jewelry-making book for teens.
Holly has collected over 4,000 children’s books (in hardback), among which are all the Newbery winners and all the Carnegies. She also has most of the Canadian award-winning children’s books, and is working on the Australian award-winners. She has read nearly all of them. She lives in a little grey house tucked back in a forest (out of cell phone and TV signal paths) under the tip of a hillside beside the Ohio River, with a lovely man, an enormous dog, and, presently, 2 ½ cats.
