Six-month writing program

Your personal writing coach

Starting next week, and every week for the next six months, A Writer’s Block will present a series on understanding and mastering the basics (and beyond) of writing fiction and creative nonfiction.

I’ve led this course one-on-one with many writers, serving as their writing coach as they worked on a novel or memoir. I’ve taught it to classes in person and online, in the US and Australia, and presented some of the lessons to writer workshops and conferences around the country.

We will cover ten specific topics over these six months. I’ll detail those topics in next week’s introduction to the course.

Ten topics in twenty-six weeks.

Some topics we will cover in a single lesson. But other topics might require three or four weeks of discussion.

Each article will be brief (less than 1,500 words on average). Each will include some exercises—homework, if you will—for you to work on or review or ignore. You don’t have to hand it in and you won’t be graded.

Having run through these courses with hundreds of writers over the years, I’ve seen significant improvement in writers’ quality and confidence. Some have gone on to land literary agents, publishing contracts, or independently publish a much higher quality work than they’d started with.

None of those success stories are because I’m such a great teacher (I’m not) or have some magic formula (I don’t), but because the writers put in the work and found some useful information in these lessons and the feedback.

Everything I cover in this course is something someone else taught me, and I’ve been able to internalize most of it over the years (okay, decades) that I’ve been writing and editing fiction.

This course will be for paid subscribers only (hey, baby needs a new pair of shoes). But the annual subscription rate is only $50. Okay, I might occasionally make one of the lessons free just as a marketing tactic to draw in more subscribers, you know, just in case baby needs another pair of shoes.

If you subscribe partway into the series, that’s wonderful. As a paid subscriber, you have access to the archives, so you can go back and start at the beginning. Or even if you started at the beginning, you can go back and review earlier lessons as you see fit.

This is purely work at your own pace. If you miss a week or two, it will be there waiting for you when you’re ready.

If you’re thinking, “I’m a complete newbie to writing,” then this course is for you. It starts at the beginning (where most stories start).

But if you’re an intermediate or more advanced writer—you’ve been at this for a while—that’s fine too. We start with the 30,000-foot view, the big picture, and slowly descend in more and more detail until we get into the weeds.

Okay, mixed metaphor since we don’t typically want the plane to land in the weeds.

The first article in this series will post next week (it will be free), an overall introduction to the course. After that, we dive in.

When I teach this course one-on-one, it costs considerably more than the $50 a year subscription to Substack. But one-on-one also entails customized, personalized lessons with feedback and critique on your writing.

While it won’t be possible to provide that personalized feedback when we’re talking dozens or hundreds (thousands? millions?) of people going through this course, I will invite you to submit some short writing samples on occasion.

From those souls brave enough to put their work out there, I will randomly choose one or two to critique publicly on Substack, with your permission, of course.

I’m confident this series of articles/lessons will help bring your writing to the next level, regardless of where you see yourself now—novice, intermediate, or advanced.

So look for the introduction to this writing coach program next week. Then, if you’re not already a subscriber and you see something that would be useful to you, please subscribe.

Invite your writer friends to join as well. If you’re in a critique group, you may find these lessons can become a group activity to help everyone.