Beginning Tracks

Whether you're just starting a novel, or are stuck halfway through, or have a complete draft you want to revise, you'll get more confidence and story control through understanding how your plot and characters can interact and strengthen each other. By deepening and intensifying your characters and plot, you can give your readers (including agents and editors!) a more exciting and satisfying experience.

Award-winning novelist and nationally known writing teacher Alicia Rasley will guide you into comprehensive exploration of your own story potential. Her strategies will help you get to know your characters better, and invent powerful scenes that showcase their conflicts and further their journey through the plot. You'll also be led back to your own story and draft to determine the theme and motifs, and learn to use these to unify and deepen your story.

Get your book plotted. Spend 3 months with NYT and USA Today bestselling author Lori Wilde plotting your book from beginning concept to a complete outline. Work out all the kinks in your story before you begin writing.

Have you always wanted to write a book, but just didn’t know where to start? Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who knows in your heart that there has to be an easier way? Have you written a book or two but still have problems finding that marketable idea? Do you want to learn how to plot like a pro?

Fog shrouded streets, clockwork machines and fiendish devices powered by steam, diabolical criminal geniuses determined to take over or change the world, and the forces of good armed with creations part 19^th century and part futuristic, and dressed to kill (if need be) in corsets, sweeping skirts and parasols or proper suits, bowlers (or Stetsons), canes and goggles. Everyone needs brass goggles! One never knows when boarding an airship, or a Darwinian creation, will be required to chase after a group of fiends, be they human, partially human, or of the paranormal persuasion. That’s what Steampunk is – in part. It’s also so much more.

**This Course is opening up for additional participants and is already in progress. You will have to submit a SavvyU Application and a 5 page sample of your writing for admittance**


This 10-workshop course takes beginning writers all the way through the first draft of a full-length novel. Each workshop is 4 weeks long with a week-long break week between workshops. The course covers how to identify basic story ideas that can sustain a whole story, define the premise of the story, add the right mix of characters and design the progression of events that resolves the premise. The course includes drafting, crafting, revising, editing, writing a synopsis, and writing a query letter.

There’s a story in you just waiting to get out, to find its way to the computer screen, to becoming a stack of paper, and on to appearing in book form. There’s just one problem: You aren’t sure how to get from having the idea to finishing the first draft, much less getting your manuscript into shape for submission.

Never fear! We’re here to help with an integrated program specifically crafted to take you from hovering at Page One to working up your courage to put a proposal in the mail to an editor or agent.