Origin to Outline

$1,200 for the full six-week course.

What it is

Origin to Outline is a six-week course that takes you from an idea to a finished, tested outline. We start with your characters and your world, work through genre, theme, and structure, and then you write a scene-by-scene outline and bring it back for a thorough review.

When it’s right for you

I recommend Origin to Outline when you’re ready to write a novel and don’t know where to start; when you’re drowning in writing advice and want something structured, built for your book, in language that makes sense to you; or when you’ve started and stopped the same novel a dozen times and can’t get to the finish line.

If you already have a complete draft, you don’t need this course. You want a manuscript assessment or a developmental edit.

What you get

Six 90-minute sessions

One a week, live. Each session reviews the pages you sent, teaches the week’s material, and leaves time for your questions.

Characters and setting. Who your protagonist is, what she wants, why she can’t have it, and what it costs her if she fails. Then where the story happens—and the smallest amount of worldbuilding you need in order to start, rather than the largest amount you could invent.
Foundation. Your commercial and content genres, and what readers of those genres arrive expecting: the scenes and conventions they’ll feel the absence of. And your theme—what the book is about underneath the plot.
Plot and structure. How many timelines, how many viewpoint characters, where the story starts and where it ends. Then your key plot points, and what has to happen between them.
Writing scenes. What a scene is and what belongs in one. When a scene earns its place, and when summary does the job better.
Scene-by-scene outline. For each scene: whose eyes we’re in, what happens, where it happens, what’s different at the end than at the beginning, and how it hands off to the next one. We write the first few together.
Pressure test. We go through your finished outline looking for what isn’t working yet. Then how to keep moving when you get stuck or the story changes on you—write forward, leave placeholders, solve only what blocks the next scene, and stop rewriting chapter one.

Sessions 1 and 2 can swap. I start with characters for writers who know who their main character is before they know anything else.

A scene-by-scene outline

By the end of the course you’ll have a complete outline you can sit down and write to—an instruction manual for your novel. When the draft is finished, a manuscript assessment or a developmental edit is the next step, and you’ll already know how I work.

Edited pages

Before each session from the second on, send me up to 1,500 words and I’ll give it a thorough line edit. Five sets over the course.

You’ll use them to practice specific craft skills: showing character emotion instead of telling it, mood through physical description, natural dialogue, worldbuilding that doesn’t become an infodump or an “As you know, Bob,” holding point of view, and giving your characters distinct voices.

We choose your topics in session one, based on the novel you’re planning and the skills you already know you want to build. Revise pages you have, or write new material.

Schedule

The course runs six consecutive weeks so you don’t lose momentum. That said, life happens—if you need more flexibility, we’ll work something out.

I schedule sessions between 12 and 4 Central, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

How we start

Schedule a complimentary half-hour call and we’ll talk about the book you want to write and whether this course is the right way into it.

If you already have manuscript pages, I’m happy to do a free sample line edit of up to 1,500 words—though most people who come to this course don’t have pages yet, and that’s rather the point.