In the core classes you'll learn the professional approach to writing essentials: how to plot, how to create good characters, how to write compelling scenes, and much more.
In single-focus classes, you'll learn how to break through blocks that are keeping you from writing well, or writing at all, with classes on motivating yourself, beating writer's block, and more.
All core and single-focus classes are designed to be accessible to beginners while offering intermediate writers and pros new directions to pursue.
Explore my core classes and single-focus classes below.
Core Classes
The Free Professional Plot Outline Course -- Learn to write a workable plot outline for any fiction project that flexes as you write, allows you to make changes without wrecking everything, and makes finishing your story easier than it's ever been. Core Class, free
How To Write Page-Turning Scenes -- Until you understand scene-writing, you cannot write good fiction. Learn how to get your characters in and out of conflict, move your story forward, engage your readers, and present the story at the pace YOU want. Core class
Create A Character Clinic -- Fictional characters are not "eye-color, hair-color, and an interesting tic." Learn to write using the seven fundamentals that will
turn your characters from cardboard to living, breathing people in your stories.
Create A Plot Clinic -- Learn to plot flexibly while creating compelling stories that don't bore readers at the beginning, bog down in the middle, or leave them bewildered (or angry with you) at the end. And have fun writing while you do it.
Create A Language Clinic -- Every novelist in every genre benefits from understanding how languages work, and how you can develop conflict, plot twists, characterization, and more simply by developing words, phrases, and concepts that fit your individual story and characters.
Create A Culture Clinic -- You need complex and divergent cultures in your fiction, no matter whether you write contemporary mainstream or complex high-fantasy. Learn to use cultures to give your work incredible, believable conflict, great characters, understandable human needs and wants, and deep, compelling plots.
How To Write Dialogue With Subtext -- Subtext is what characters aren't saying out loud when they're talking, and if you master the skill writing dialogue with subtext, you'll give your reader the thrill of understanding the unsaid, following your story on multiple levels, and immersing himself in conflicts that feel real (but that are infinitely more interesting than real life...) And you'll never write dull dialogue again.
How To Find Your Writing Discipline -- Learn how to get yourself writing regularly while still living your life, working your job, taking care of your family, and sleeping, too.
How To Beat Writer's Block -- In most cases, you can put an end to writer's block in one hour. This course will show you how, and walk you back to the process of writing regularly, and with joy.
21 Ways To Write Through Disaster -- Life can come at you hard. Learn how to roll with the punches and keep writing, and how to get paid well by using your worst disasters and debacles to write 'can't-put-down' fiction.
The Writer's Shop -- Classes and reference works to help you write better, get the details right, and create fiction that matters to you...and your readers.
Home
About NWS
Career Courses
Core Classes
Support
Free Plot Outline
Think Sideways
Revise Your Novel
Write A Series
Great Scenes
Character Clinic
Plot Clinic
Language Clinic
Culture Clinic
Clinic 4-Pack
Dialogue
Writing Discipline
Motivate Yourself
Beat Writer's Block
Work Thru Trauma
Writers' Shop