Prepare to write your best book yet and put your new storytelling expertise into practice. The course takes an insider’s look under the bonnet of Pulitzer and Booker Prize-winning novels like The Secret History by Donna Tartt, White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Normal People by Sally Rooney, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and many, many more to discover how the most famous contemporary novels work.

Meet the author of the course and start work considering how you are as an author and what might be the next best book suited to you and your particular strengths. 

Louise Dean has won the Society of Authors Betty Trask Prize, was winner of Le Prince Maurice, a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Costa Coffee Books Short Story Award, and was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize and The Booker Prize. Her last novel was an Oprah Book of the Week and she has been praised as a writer by the Wall Street Journal and many other publications, and by the Nobel Laureate for Literature J.M. Coetzee.

You’ll enjoy bonus instructional videos from your course companion, bestselling author Kate Riordan, as she takes the course to write her next novel. 

1. Welcome

2. The Crossroads

A story often begins with the main character poised on the brink of a life-changing crisis. For the first of our course topics, we’ll explain why ensuring they are not like you allows you to use aspects of your experience more freely. Know the Big Question the reader is reading to find out. Create a credible setting with just five core components to establish a sense of place. Formulate your theme with a positive and negative pole to organise your story. We’ll consider the narrative perspective: who’s left standing? What axe does your narrator have to grind? From what time and place are they telling this story and why? We’ll prepare a story structure, reading and analysing exemplary works by Patrick Rothfuss, Liane Moriarty, Daphne du Maurier, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Meg Rosoff, Mark Haddon and more.

3. Theme

4. The Main Character

5. The Big Question

6. The Setting

7. Narrative Perspective

8. Hero Books

9. Story Structure

In the second phase of the course, we’ll outline an exciting plot and begin casting to ensure you’re writing a story packing action and drama. The character arc for your hero is driven by conflict. What the main character wants is not what they need! We’ll share our Advance/Block and Peek-a-Boo writing techniques to help you construct a plot helpfully and simply articulated by the midpoint. Discover our Four Personality Types for casting the principal players. Consider the best treatment for your story, discover why the first person tends to lend itself to stories about exceptional people and the third person tends to deal with exceptional situations. Write The Plan for your novel with all the key prime movers on one page, and go from stage to page trialling the choices you have made to serve your ideas and your story.

10. Starting to Plot

11. The Cast

12. Treatment

13. The Main Character – Feeling For Them

14. Midpoint

15. The First Plan

16. From Stage to Page

We’ll take absolute control of the material to flesh out and pace the plot, adding the second character and sub-plot or B Story. With in-depth character development, we’ll start learning more about the true nature of your main character by pushing them to extremes. Until now, they’ve been engaged in a charade. Once they’re in big trouble, we’re going to find out who they are and what they need. We’ll focus on a plot (and players) stacked against them in the first half of your novel. We’ll widen our casting to include minor players to serve the theme of your story – unreliably yet credibly – and we’ll show you how, ironically, it’s their monomaniacal thinking that gives them dimension on the page. Let’s find the agent provocateur, the second character, who will expose your hero. We’ll look at how the character flaw or wound hinders the hero’s progress and get them to come clean in the second half of your novel. 

17. No More Play Acting

18. The Plot Thickens!

19. Process

20. Biography

21. The B Story

22. The Second Character

23. The Cast

Ever wished you could have an outline for a brilliant chapter, blow-by-blow? Discover the preferred chaptering formats of authors from Agatha Christie to Sally Rooney with The Bullet-proof Chapter, a technique that helps prepare each and every chapter for smooth writing. Dive into writing your story with economy and style. Raise your game and save yourself an edit with lessons and assignments to help you keep your writing lively, bold and on point. Discover some advanced craft magic tricks and skills from great authors. These unique insights and sleights of hand will have readers glued to your pages.

Enjoy access to resources, advice on marketing, social media, publishing communication skills and other essentials for your career as a published author.

24. The Bullet-Proof Chapter 

25. Opening the Story

26. Doubts and Dithering

27. Cut

28. The Last Piece

29. Meet Your Novel

30. Onwards

Bonus Lessons:

Magic Tricks and Tips

Tips For Published Authors: Social Media
Career Advice

In this self-paced course, you will enjoy 30 lessons with videos and text giving you guidance to fully create, outline and plan your next novel. You’ll be guided step-by-step within the course and be served downloads and tools at just the right time for the development of your story plan. You’ll enjoy the support of the online community, with a dedicated group for this course and a special monthly workshop for those on this course.

You will have access to the course for a year.

A notebook, a pen and a computer with a decent internet connection for use of our online learning platform and the Zoom-based coaching sessions. Our online learning platform is easy to use, even for the less tech-savvy among us. We are supportive and responsive to our writers, available by email and at our online members’ community around the clock, worldwide, so that you can relax and enjoy your writing.

You may begin your coaching program whenever you wish but we suggest you take the course and then start coaching to help you pace your writing in the months ahead. You have access to the course and coaching for a year. Your first coaching session begins with your writing coach understanding your intentions and aspirations for your book and writing career. That’s your brief to us, and allows us to give you the dedicated and personal guidance and support you need to achieve your ambition.

All sessions are recorded for you to keep and we keep abreast of your story progress with our interactive process.

The coaching sessions are 45 minutes by Zoom, and you’ll find that’s plenty of time to get help with story development and troubleshoot any problems to stay on track with your writing. 

You can browse our writing coaches and find the author you would most like to work with, then book your coaching session in your Membership Area.

A great way to consider who you want to write with is to take a peek inside the first pages of their published books on Amazon and see whose writing style appeals to you most strongly. The wonderful thing about The Novelry, unlike any other writing course, is that you can work with the writing coach of your choice but also book sessions with any other writing coach whenever you wish. So if things change for your story, say you swap genre, or need more help on specialist technical matters from another coach, we’ve got you covered.

Our courses are suitable for people with visual or auditory impairment, dyslexia and for those with English as a second language. We offer an app which translates the course into 99 languages and offers a speak-aloud option too. Learn more here.

Yes, we are all for Happy Writing. You can review our terms and conditions here. If for any reason at all the course is not for you, you can get a full no-questions-asked refund within the first 7 days after purchase. Just email us and let us know.