Discover the big hack that will change your creative life. Learn the one characteristic great writers need, and the essential ingredient for a page-turner. 10 writerly espresso shots to take in one day, or a weekend.

• Welcome
  Set the foundation for writing your novel with a day to take these ten espresso shots to boost your morale and get you in the flow. Kick some old habits with some unusual tips to change your state of mind to one that is positively refreshed and raring to write.
• Read and Be Inspired
  Read what you want to write. Study first chapters to see how great novels raise questions they later answer. Focus on story over style. Use reading to quell doubt daily, and build your confidence. Keep notes and prepare questions for your coach as your story begins to take shape.
• Bedtime Stories
  Reconnect with the books that first stirred a desire to write. Reflect on the emotional imprint of your early reading. Writing begins with that same private charge. Let gratitude, not pressure, guide the work. The impulse to write is your longing to speak across time and space.
• Habits
  Design a writing life that fits your real one. Build a simple routine that anchors your writing at a regular time each day. Avoid waiting for inspiration; consistency is the key.
• The Big Hack
  Make a meaningful sacrifice for a big reward. Something must go. Identify what you’ll give up to honor the work ahead. Stop the cycle of perfectionism by writing fast and free. Write by hand in timed sessions to bypass the inner critic. Capture raw material first. Refinement comes later.
• Privacy
  Protect your work from feedback, judgment, or scrutiny while it’s still forming. Keep the process private. Don’t announce your novel or share early pages. Privacy is the condition for freedom of exploration and free-range creativity!
• Empathy
  Build a character by stepping inside their experience. Begin with feeling, not facts. Let your empathy lead. Treat your character as an enigma. Tease out their contradictions for a more intriguing story.
• Moods
  Track your emotional state and work with it, not against it. Use your current mood as material. Keep writing through restlessness, boredom, or doubt. Let the act of writing transform your mood, rather than relying on your mood to begin.
• Bless You, Writers
  You’ll face loneliness, and self-doubt, but writing is an act of generosity. Writing well means living well; in other words self-acceptance. Keep faith with your story. Remember, a novelist needs questions, not answers.
• What is Story?
  A story begins with change. It puts a person in jeopardy. In fiction, people change, and the story is structured around that. Plot is the engine that reveals who your character truly is capable of becoming.

Take it steady with step-by-step guidance to prepare a one-page story plan that packs a big plot. This is where you go beyond an idea or first outline into a fully-fleshed novel plan. A good story (almost) writes itself, so you and your writing coach will begin work on a full-length novel storyline now. For those coming to The Big Write from The Big Idea, there is no overlap of material. We look at some of the same all-important aspects of a novel, differently, as part of an overarching plot.

1. Lesson 1: How to stay on track with the course
   We explain how you will use the first 15 days to plan out your full-length novel storyline and work with your coach using “The Plan” for ongoing feedback to keep your story development on track. If you’re rewriting, use this phase to reassess structure. This is where you set yourself up to finish a first draft.
2. Lesson 2: Welcome to your novel
   Shape your novel’s premise by crafting a working title, a one-line pitch, and a promise to your reader. Start with something you know or care deeply about, then create distance by shifting time, place, or character to unlock perspective and theme. Identify your protagonist’s flaw and charm, then root your story in the voice and style of books you love. Keep refining the idea daily in your notebook—flipping it, challenging it, adding stakes—until it becomes a story worth the reader’s time.
3. Lesson 3: The “Hero Book”
   A constant guiding light used by working authors. Choose a single “Hero Book” from our candidates in every genre to guide your novel-writing journey and lean on a clear, reliable structure. Read it nightly to internalize its rhythm and shape. This book becomes your technical mentor, helping you solve story problems as you draft. It’s your companion for the course. Use it to support your structure and voice.
4. Lesson 4: The golden hour
   Build the habit of showing up daily for one hour to keep your novel alive in your subconscious. Even a brief check in daily, reading yesterday’s work or jotting notes, feeds the 23 other hours of reflection that shape the story. One hour is enough.
5. Lesson 5: Genre
   You need to get to grips with the drivers of the genre of fiction you have committed to write now. Learn how to use genre to define your reader promise. Explore examples across other fiction in your chosen lane to see how genre shapes plot, character, setting, and theme.
6. Lesson 6: Setting
   Use your setting to generate atmosphere, reveal character, or frame your story’s moral universe. Research real locations or build imagined ones that feel lived-in and essential to the story. For fantasy or sci-fi, create thresholds between worlds and combine the familiar with the strange. Make setting work as metaphor, emotional driver, and lens for your protagonist’s worldview.
7. Lesson 7: The magic trick
   Build your story’s arc using this three-part technique of The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige. Shape your plot around your character’s transformation: what they want, and what they need. It’s about moral change. Sketch a journey that promises real stakes and delivers powerful, surprising resolution.
8. Lesson 8: The main character
   Design into your main character a clear flaw. Anchor the plot in their resistance to change. Focus on how they behave under pressure; not backstory, but present struggle. Show what’s at stake for them emotionally. Give them a worldview that will be challenged. The story must test and transform them.
9. Lesson 9: The plot
   Start shaping your plot by identifying the problem your main character must face. Learn how to use structure as a flexible tool, not a rigid template (please no!), using our methods including working back from a possible ending and sketching key complications along the way. Explore the “Man in a Hole” story shape and other tools. Begin using The Plan, your one-page outline, for your daily story briefing. Focus on pressure, escalation, and change as you throw rocks at your character’s beliefs and force a reckoning point.
10. Lesson 10: Simple story structure
    First, assess the two halves of the story, problem and solution, and get them anchored by a midpoint that brings transformation. Then use our unique approach to solve the rest of your plot. Use The Five Fs® to map your story’s arc. Each stage reveals your character’s blind spot, trials, and growth. Study examples from contemporary fiction in every genre to see how this long-form story structure works.
11. Lesson 11: The hook
    Time to refine it now, so it’s sharp as a tack. A new one-sentence pitch that captures your refined premise. Build it around irony to give the story air. Explore techniques from both literary and high-concept fiction, including the “X meets Y” formula. Use your new hook to test your story’s power before you begin writing.
12. Lesson 12: The cast
    Build your cast by splitting your own traits into characters, then widen the net. Use parts of your personality to shape your leads. Add figures from your life with a twist: change names, genders, or roles. Consider the ethics of representation and whose story you’re telling. Finish with a list of characters who offer the most dramatic potential for your story.
13. Lesson 13: Character development
    Create credible characters by listing their quirks, flaws, fears, and secrets, then use those to reveal personality through action and dialogue. Skip backstory dumps by knowing each character and what they want. Use our short list of 20 prompts to fast-track this work. Focus on the top five to ten characters and return to this exercise during slower writing days to help move the story along.
14. Lesson 14: Getting organized
    Before you begin writing, do the housekeeping. Use folders to store drafts, character sheets, and notes. Keep a hard copy of your outline visible at all times and update daily. Use your notebook to capture freewriting. Track your scenes with a spreadsheet and tools.
15. Lesson 15: The Plan
    Create the refined one-page novel storyline to guide your writing and coaching sessions. Draft your hook, synopsis, theme, and the big question your reader will be reading to answer. Use this live document to shape your plot as you write. Submit your Plan at least 24 hours before each session so your coach can stay up to speed. This working outline will become the backbone of your process all the way toward submission, eventually.
16. Lesson 16: Let’s write!
    Focus on daily progress; start with 250 words and build gradually. Use your updated Plan weekly to track changes, knowing your plot and character will shift as you write. Show up, write, revise, and keep going.
17. Lesson 17: Point of view
    Time to nail it down. Choose between first or third person based on your story’s needs. Learn how first person creates immersion and unreliability while third offers distance, breadth, and universality. Test them on the page, including using free indirect speech as a powerful tool to blend close perspective with third-person narration.
18. Lesson 18: Voice
    Let your voice emerge from you see the world. A good voice convinces by understatement. Explore examples of relaxed, confident storytelling in action. Avoid fakery or flourish. Use our tools to assert your voice, all-important in the age of AI. The goal is to invite the reader into an intimate human conversation.
19. Lesson 19: Chapter one
    First chapters are never final, they’re rewritten dozens of times. Set a calm, confident tone, introducing character and setting, and offer up something awry to pique your reader’s interest. Focus on what your protagonist wants, hint at what they need. Write 250 relaxed words.
20. Lesson 20: Character mapping
    Design each supporting character with a moral arc that affects your protagonist’s development. Ensure each character throws “rocks” at the hero to reveal flaws and create friction. Distribute your cast across the moral range of your theme. Use The Novelry’s Four Types Method as a tool for the close-knit core.
21. Lesson 21: Relationships
    Map the web of relations, noting each character’s role as helper or hinderer, anchoring your story in conflict and desire. Study push-pull dynamics for high drama. Conjure subplots with hidden motives and unspoken needs. Create a visual map to find narrative pressure points. Let the tension between characters help you with plot holes now.
22. Lesson 22: Emotional strategies
    Assign each major character a core emotional strategy: how they’ve learned to get love and attention. Observe how this ingrained tactic shapes their relationships, and drives their conversations. Characters may switch strategies but one dominant ploy can underpin each principal’s behavior, to the reader’s delight.
23. Lesson 23: The theme
    Test every story element now against a central thematic tension: what argument is your novel truly making? Place your protagonist at the center of a tug-of-war of values. Use bold statements like “X is more likely than Y” to guide your choices. Add your refined working theme to The Plan.
24. Lesson 24: The heart of a story
    Find the emotional truth at the center of your novel. A moment of vulnerability or personal reckoning that carries moral weight and matters hugely to you. This becomes your compass, and the story’s purpose: to make us care.
25. Lesson 25: The names
    A small piece of code which packs a lot of data. Choose early, and consider ways of charging the names of your characters using an emotive shorthand that will prove useful to your reader too.
26. Lesson 26: The sacrifice
    Learn how great stories in every genre use sacrifice, where the protagonist gives up comfort for a greater purpose. Ask what your characters are willing to lose.
27. Lesson 27: A better craftsman
    Step back from the page and assess your work. Re-read your recent writing to identify weak scenes, tired phrasing, and moments where the plot drifts. Revisit your Plan, revise it if the story has shifted, and tighten.
28. Lesson 28: The big picture
    Visualize your story as a sequence of six turning-point scenes, using cinematic techniques to clarify structure and momentum. Identify your protagonist, goal, antagonistic force, and stakes. Then build a visual storyboard using notecards or tools like Canva to map transitions and flesh out scenes. Each location must earn its place.
29. Lesson 29: Happy writing
    Work through self-doubt, and the ups and downs of real life. Try some proven mindset strategies from working writers including how to embrace the rhythms of good and bad writing days. Avoid nervy fiddling, and trust your day-to-day process.
30. Lesson 30: Taking stock
    Pause to review progress before moving to the next phase. Use the stocktaking spreadsheet to chart chapter-by-chapter word counts, setbacks, and lessons learned. Update The Plan and reflect on how far you’ve come. Schedule time with your coach before the next leg: The Swim.

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Expert craft skills. Find your voice as your word count passes the 10,000-word mark.

1. Lesson 31: In the swim
   A shift from story set-up to story flow. Revisit the five-part structure to add to the plot and shape the story now. Retain focus on output, not polish. Learn how compulsion drives story. When a character wants something almost beyond reason, the novel almost writes itself. This new phase is about rhythm, grace, and pace.
2. Lesson 32: Moral range
   Find your detonator. Know what will set off a story explosion by exploring your protagonist’s moral range. Define what they can and can’t do, and identify the lie they live by. Use this to create tension scene by scene now as the story shifts from old world to new. Know what they’ll do when cornered to drive maximum emotional impact chapter by chapter.
3. Lesson 33: Compulsion
   Pinpoint your main character’s hidden need that drives their actions and blinds them to the truth. Desire, denial, and delusion create narrative drive. Explore their inner hunger. Repressed or transgressive compulsions can bring extra page-turning drama. TIme to expose the character’s organizing myth.
4. Lesson 34: Conflict
   Conflict reveals theme. Let your protagonist and antagonist pull from opposite ends of a moral or emotional spectrum. Use tension to test values, surface hidden agendas, and create moments of rupture that lay turhts bare. Design and decide the moment of greatest conflict so that it dramatizes the central question of your novel now.
5. Lesson 35: From magic to mystery
   Shift from plotting answers to posing questions: what the reader is reading to find out, and what you’re writing to discover as the author. Use the one-page plan to hold structure while staying open to surprises. At the two-thirds mark of the story, you can plan to allow spiritual meaning to emerge. Allow for some mystery to drive the story forward for you and the reader.
6. Lesson 36: How to write a cult classic
   Borrow Jack Kerouac’s methods to create immersive, character-led fiction. Study his use of real people, not types, and mimic his overfamiliarity and snappy prose and dialogue to bring the music to your voice. Use observation to dodge over exposition, for the the illusion of spontaneity. Time to move toward your own bold, idiosyncratic work.
7. Lesson 37: A real dream
   Master the technique of “show, don’t tell” by using concrete sensory detail and true-to-life dialogue. Build vivid scenes while still knowing when to step in and tell to expedite plot details.
8. Lesson 38: Assumed familiarity
   Immerse the reader instantly by bringing characters to life without formal introduction. Kerouac uses eccentricity, catchphrases, and vivid, selective detail to distinguish a large cast. Use tics, colorful backstories, and out-of-type traits to avoid stereotypes and animate even minor characters.
9. Lesson 39: The romantic imagination
   Build your authorial approach of taste, sensibility, and theme. Channel your own aesthetic preferences into character and story. Discover how to make the uncommon and the unlikely feel true using fiction to paint a new reality.
10. Lesson 40: The use of repetition
    Use repetition to build intimacy with economy. Establish character through repeated phrases or gestures. Repetition keeps the reader’s eye on the cast while you advance the theme. Deploy signature catchphrases that echo the novel’s central question rather than using heavy-handed mechanics that labor your theme.
11. Lesson 41: Redemption
    Great fiction offers moral judgment through affection and time. Learn how to use the redemptive arc. Study the technique of flash-forward to deliver a sense of earned perspective. Redemption can be quiet. Understand how even flawed characters can be forgiven, and why good writing must show grace.
12. Lesson 42: Keep it simple
    Streamline your story by asking: whose story is this, what do they learn, and how do they change? Reduce characters, settings, and complications that aren’t essential. Troubleshoot problems like weak conflict or a protagonist too close to yourself. Use our quick fixes to create distance. Anchor the plot in present conflict, not backstory, for a clean, energetic through-line.
13. Lesson 43: Overwriting
    Cut, cut, cut! Cut overwriting before it sabotages your story. This lesson shows how bloated prose; didactic tangents, tired set pieces, excessive emotion, and decorative adverbs, slow your pace. Great writers use restraint. Apply three core techniques: trim adjectives and adverbs, reduce description to pinpointed detail, and shorten sentence length. Good writing leaves space for the reader.
14. Lesson 44: Becoming an author
    Start working like a professional preparing for publication now. Learn how to format your manuscript correctly and apply it now. Spacing, punctuation, paragraphing, and chapter layout all contribute to how the reader receives your work. This lesson sets the standards that separate the aspiring writer from the working author.
15. Lesson 45: The midpoint
    Pinpoint the exact moment when your character can no longer go back at the midpoint of the novel. Identify the event or crisis that forces a shift in strategy, where their old ways fail and a new outlook begins. Show how they absorb qualities of their antagonist, confront hard truths, and begin their transformation. Update The Plan with this turning point. This lesson crystallizes your story’s change: what they wanted was wrong; now it’s time to fight for what they need. And into the second half!

Into the second half and it’s time to raise the stakes in your story.

1. Lesson 46: Music
   Use music as a tool to charge the energy and rhythm of your writing. This lesson introduces the Heat Phase with a focus on boosting pace and word count too.
2. Lesson 47: From What If to Why?
   Shift the driving question of your novel from “What if?” to “Why?” to deepen plot and character. Refine the core reader question using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs starting from physical survival and safety to love, esteem, and purpose. Bestselling novels sustain tension through a single, evolving question. Use your character’s willful refusal to meet their basic needs to push the plot. Dig into what your character won’t do and why.
3. Lesson 48: The B Story
   Construct a subplot that amplifies your novel’s theme and throws the main character’s journey into sharper relief. This secondary storyline should represent the opposite value system or outcome as embodied by a standout secondary character and bring it into conflict with the “A” plot. Authors use B Stories to expose the moral consequences of your protagonist’s choices. Decide where this subplot will peak, ensuring it helps your hero reject the extreme of your theme and make their own way forward.
4. Lesson 49: The lie
   Find your novel’s core message by identifying the lie it exposes. Lies fuel suspense! We examine how theme emerges when falsehood is revealed. Reframe character motivation by showing what they believe that isn’t true, and structure your novel as a journey from illusion to truth. Learn how to embed the lie in dialogue, catchphrases, and chapter turns to keep the reader gripped.
5. Lesson 50: I’m a creep
   Use your shadow self to unlock honesty in your writing. Identify your flaws and contradictions. Practice observing your darkest instincts, then shape them into your protagonist’s turning point. Learn to slow narrative time around moments of self-revelation to weight them.
6. Lesson 51: Suspense
   Build suspense by withholding information and creating unease. Study how novels like Rebecca and In a Dark, Dark Wood use repetition, contradiction, and delay to disorient the reader. Use short chapters, flashbacks, and emotionally charged contrasts—hot/cold, light/dark—to keep tension rising. Assign a “trigger word” to each chapter and increase danger over time. Withhold answers until after the midpoint, where the worst thing must happen. Suspense is built on uncertainty. What the reader fears is more powerful than what they know.
7. Lesson 52: Make it harder
   Impose constraints to sharpen your writing: shorten chapters, limit word counts, or apply a ticking clock. Increase external pressure on your main character: cut resources, create urgency. Tight structure boosts pace, and limits force invention. The harder the context, the stronger the message.
8. Lesson 53: Crackling conversations
   Learn how to craft character agendas, cut exposition, and leave space for subtext. Discover how to avoid dull “ping-pong” exchanges and use silence, refusal, or abrupt exits for tension. Explore why contractions, clipped speech, and differentiated voices make dialogue real. Master clean tags, minimal adverbs, and active speech hat reveals character.
9. Lesson 54: That’s peculiar!
   Learn how to write with dissonance, deliberately using details that just don’t fit. Study the masters of the short form, like Chekhov, Carver, and Hemingway, to show what jars instead of what explains. Use visual anomalies to jolt your reader’s perception and avoid having to rely on melodrama. Highlight oddities and peculiarities that linger in the mind.
10. Lesson 55: The leitmotif
    Discover how a lightly recurring detail, like a phrase, image, or object, can build intimacy between writer and reader. Explore subtle echoes that function like a shared in-joke or chorus. Thread a small motif through your novel to highlight emotional themes.
11. Lesson 56: The absurd
    Introduce the irrational into your novel to deepen realism. Draw from Camus, Kafka, and Vonnegut to explore characters in conflict with a meaningless world. Use contradiction, bathos, and surreal events for existential truths. Give characters odd behaviors or false beliefs and unlock humor in tragedy. Absurdity lets your story bypass logic to process pain. Add a comic wrong note! Let the bizarre do some heavy lifting.
12. Lesson 57: The full stop. Period.
    You will study radical economy of style to understand the emotional power of unaffected prose. Learn how to end scenes and chapters with impact using the “dying fall”, a literary technique that creates an introspective pause. Use punctuation, silence, and space to invite the reader in. Then stop. Let them think.
13. Lesson 58: Backstory
    Minimize backstory to keep momentum. Avoid digressions and let the present action reveal character. If background must be included, use it only when it advances the story. Draft a private inventory of essential backstory in your notebook then work around it.
14. Lesson 59: Transitions
    Learn how to shift between timelines or perspectives while maintaining the progress of the story. Structure each timeline to serve the story. Study structural examples from novels to master seamless cuts. Build dual narratives that interact meaningfully. Whether you are using alternating chapters or blending timelines inside scenes, use each shift to advance the theme. Transitions must feel inevitable, and a boon to the reading experience, not a sideways pass.
15. Lesson 60: The prize
    Consider what success means for you now as you enter the last stretch. Don’t show or share your draft yet. Keep your vision intact and hunker down for momentum. Book another coaching session to bring your author coach up to speed before you move into the next phase.

In which everything that was hidden is revealed to both the writer and the reader. Discover the deft touches that give the reader those “a-ha” moments, and see the proof on the page that you’re mastering the skills of the craft.

1. Lesson 61: Mastery
   Enter The Enlightenment Phase by studying a master at work, Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee. His novel Disgrace becomes one of your blueprints for serious fiction in this pahse along with Alice Walker and The Color Purple. Embrace slow, scrutinized craft. Discover moral sleight of hand, structural control, and linguistic precision. Learn how personal wreckage becomes literary gold.
2. Lesson 62: Difficult questions
   Embrace uncertainty. Discover how doubt, revision, and slow accumulation work for your craft and the material in fine detail.
3. Lesson 63: Self-destruction
   Great novelists create fiction through radical self-erasure. The main character and author come to blows in philosophical confrontation. In the best fiction writing, we are served an unflinching confrontation with shame. Writing at this level you need to get a grasp on your internal conflict. Willingness to burn down the house of self yields a story of brutal grace. 
4. Lesson 64: The title
   A novel’s title encapsulates the agent of change. Test titles against your story’s evolution, generating titles that capture the magic of your story.
5. Lesson 65: The wound
   A wound drives a character’s compulsion. Write suffering without sentimentality for integrity of craft.
6. Lesson 66: The bridge
   Revisit your opening sentence again now; it should beckon the story’s ending. Track how character and language have evolved.
7. Lesson 67: Back and forth process
   Embrace the messy business of drafting but get ahead of the game now and avoid a draft or two with some insights to deliver this book in better shape than most at first draft. This lesson draws from J.M. Coetzee’s 17 drafts of Disgrace to show how great work emerges from doubt. Taste and judgment are sharpened by failure.
8. Lesson 68: Present tension
   Explore the dramatic force of the present for instability, complicity, and immediacy by removing the safety of hindsight. Through examples like Disgrace and The Color Purple, see how the narration drives urgency and places the reader inside the character’s crisis. If your prose feels flat, consider testing a change of tense now to rescue it.
9. Lesson 69: Poet and programmer
   Refine your sentence style with the dual precision of a programmer and the emotional depth of a poet. Rhythm is a literary device. Discover how prose can carry musicality, and also advance line by line, with the precision of code.
10. Lesson 70: The chapter outline
    Create a revised working chapter-by-chapter outline to clarify the structure and pacing of your novel. Use it to identify gaps, and simplify where needed. Study Coetzee’s Disgrace for a model of formal, purpose-driven structure: 24 chapters, each self-contained, each building tension and meaning. Focus on progress with economy: state your purpose, fulfill it, and move on. Use the outline to ensure every chapter earns its place.
11. Lesson 71: Let them live
    Free your main character from their backstory now and let them step forward toward the ending. The best characters contradict their traits, hold true and false beliefs, and surprise both the writer and reader. Leave room for ambiguity at the end, allowing your novel to cast a longer shadow.
12. Lesson 72: The point of tragedy
    Tragedy operates as a vehicle for truth. Learn Aristotle’s three essential components: hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnorisis. Understand how tragedy forces reckoning. Tragedy delivers absolute truth through emotional disasters.
13. Lesson 73: What is good?
    Fiction transcends our basic notions of good and bad to offer moral ambiguity. Learn how to use visionary states like hypnagogia to deepen your protagonist’s self-awareness. Trace a character arc from egotism to humility, observing how memory, vision, and anagnorisis (tragic recognition) shape internal reckoning. It is grace, not goodness, the author delivers.
14. Lesson 74: The big question
    Refine the question driving your story by identifying what the reader is reading to find out: whether it’s whodunnit, will they get the prize, or who is this person really? Study how this central question can shift mid-novel, as in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Disgrace, as character, setting, or theme develops.
15. Lesson 75: The story so far
    Review the full arc of your novel. Your character, and you, have come a long way. Neither of you are who you were. Book a coaching session and update The Plan. This is your opportunity to reframe the entire work, strengthen the through-line, and prepare to carry the story forward to the end now you have everything in plain sight.

Where it all comes together: theme, arc, change. The subplots are now working in harmony for a satisfying ending. You’ll have a first draft manuscript in your hands and a story readers will love.

1. Lesson 76: Welcome home
   Review the final structure and make adjustments so the story is sound and grounded. Contrast your main character’s initial façade with their new self to clarify the novel’s arc. Use dream imagery and metaphor to explore how personal symbols, memories, and meaning can enrich your story. Prepare a sketch of the ending. The home stretch begins here.
2. Lesson 77: Let’s build
   Assign your existing chapters to the Five Fs framework. Use this scaffolding to make sense of your draft and prepare it for a strong finish. Reorder material, if needed, to clarify escalation and transformation. Whether your chapters are short or long, give each a place in this sequence.
3. Lesson 78: The house of magic
   Use music and hypnagogic recall to explore each emotional stage of the story as a space: a messy front room, a closed bedroom, a blocked escape, a chaotic kitchen, and a bathroom of reckoning. Revise your Plan and schedule a coaching session to align story shape and character change.
4. Lesson 79: The rooms
   Plan your chapters as spaces within the larger structure of the house of your novel. Avoid plot drift; make sure every chapter flows naturally from the last. Cut anything that doesn’t develop both the psychological interior and action-oriented exterior.
5. Lesson 80: Interior style
   Raise the standard of your writing by setting a higher bar for every sentence. Evaluate every line: is it necessary, true, distinctive? Create contrast. Plain-speaking can sharpen the impact of strangeness.
6. Lesson 81: Ornaments
   Lend your novel the personal things that bring you comfort and joy: the objects, sounds, and memories that mean something to you.
7. Lesson 82: The attic
   Learn how to use memory as a narrative space distinct from backstory. This is where you and your main character explore forgotten emotions and formative impressions. Use this mental storehouse to create atmospheric revelations. The attic holds what’s unsaid. Return to it in moments of reckoning or reflection.
8. Lesson 83: Housekeeping
   Learn how to recover from derailment without spiraling. Use your notebook to make quick notes instead of forcing bad writing. Trust your Plan and cut what doesn’t serve. Keep the novel safe, warm, and clean from inner sabotage.
9. Lesson 84: And so to bed
   Craft an ending that opens, rather than closes, a window. Examine famous last lines that conjure mystery, and understand how a question could become your final gesture. Complete your draft knowing it’s whole, for now.
10. Lesson 85: Home alone
    Writing reveals more than its words. Don’t seek outside opinions yet. Stay inside the work. Keep the mystery intact. The story has found its voice now, and you may need to sit with it.
11. Lesson 86: First aid kit
    Use these tips as a personal survival guide for when the doubt creeps in. A writer’s emergency kit for staying the course and finishing strong.
12. Lesson 87: Leaving home
    Pause before editing. Set the manuscript aside for at least a month to gain the distance required for ruthless revision. Use that time to sharpen your judgment. Make sure the story arises from character, offers transformation, and delivers what the reader needs.
13. Lesson 88: The second draft
    Use the break to read recent novels in your genre, experiment with “sideways writing.” Revisit your story with distance as a reader. Prepare for The Big Edit, where you’ll receive expert editorial support to transform your draft into a submission-ready novel.
14. Lesson 89: Success
    Discover how to stay grounded through setbacks, resist the lure of fame, and preserve your joy. You are a writer. You have written a book. Embrace the the life and work of a writer.
15. Lesson 90: Congratulations!
    Celebrate! You’ve built the habit, learned the craft, and shaped a novel only you could write. Acknowledge the discipline it took you to get here. Download your certificate, share the news, and put your feet up. For a month.

Plus genre-specific lessons, mini courses in memoir and children’s fiction, and resources.

Authors mentioned in the course include: Jane Austen, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier, Gillian Flynn, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, Shirley Jackson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rachel Cusk, Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan, Emily Brontë, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Carson McCullers, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway.

Your course certificate

Go from writer to author with a clear, strategic roadmap, practical tools, smart systems, and a new publishing-ready mindset shift. Get a clear editorial roadmap and a structured revision process designed to take a manuscript to submission standard. The Big Edit is designed to save you drafts by front-loading editorial expertise for strategic story development before you move to line edits.

1. Lesson 1: Welcome
   Commit to working in long, focused sessions as you begin the structural edit phase of your novel. Learn the four-phase roadmap ahead, from Structural Development through the Line Edit to your Submission Process, and discover when to book your Big Edit sessions with editors who’ve acquired, edited, and published books at Big Five houses. Set your first draft aside and start raising your standards — this is where you stop writing for yourself and start shaping a novel for publication.‍
2. Lesson 2: Preparation Guide
   Learn to read your own work like a professional editor, using the formatting standards publishing houses expect — fonts, margins, indentation, and dialogue conventions, US and UK covered side by side. This lesson shows you how to build the critical distance you’ll need to edit with a reader’s eye.

You’ll develop your elevator pitch, story theme, structure, narrative arc, character development, midpoint, and more to work toward a chapter outline and a (pain-free) synopsis. Then it’s time for your first review session with a professional editor.

1. Lesson 3: The Structural Edit
   Understand the difference between a structural edit and a line edit, and why you must get your story’s big-picture elements right before you touch a single sentence. Expect bold, sweeping changes at this early stage for the very best version of your book.
2. Lesson 4: The Hook
   Distill your novel’s premise into a single sentence that gets an agent excited. Learn the one-line pitch equation drawn from novels that sold for six and seven figures, and what your particular genre demands of its pitch. Pressure-test it until it’s sharp enough to pin to your wall.
3. Lesson 5: The Genre
   Nail the genre your novel belongs to, and the promise it makes to readers before they’ve read a word. Explore the key genres and their subgenres, how blending and mashups work when they’re done well. Your genre decides which shelf your book sits on and every editorial choice that follows.
4. Lesson 6: The Title
   Find the title that works as a statement of intent. Use the “walk your title” method to identify your story’s agent of change, the event after which nothing can be the same, and compare candidates with popular examples.
5. Lesson 7: The Storyline
   Get to grips with the driver of every story: change. Identify your agent of change, and combine theme, conflict, and character into your plot. Nail your inciting incident, midpoint, and ending before you rewrite your working synopsis.
6. Lesson 8: Story Structure with The Five Fs©
   Develop your best story structure and chart your character’s moral journey using The Novelry’s Five Fs©. Learn how to apply this story spine identifying the turning points that expose your protagonist’s arc from first flaw to final reckoning.
7. Lesson 9: The Synopsis
   Turn your story into a snappy one-pager that proves your plot delivers with this diagnostic tool to reveal whether your story’s structure is actually working. Use our “steps up, steps down” model to shape your synopsis and practice the professional potted version agents expect.
8. Lesson 10: The Chapter Outline
   Build a chapter-by-chapter account of your novel that turns your story structure and synopsis into a concrete plan of action. Learn what Big Five editors look for. This document becomes your guide for the redraft, and, alongside your synopsis, what you’ll submit ahead of your Big Edit First Session.
9. Lesson 11: Casting
   Make sure every character earns their place on the page by mapping the main players along our “rope of theme.” Try our Four Types framework and learn to root each major player in circumstances, associations, and distinguishing detail.
10. Lesson 12: Character
    Give characters agency by anchoring their actions in desire. Explore how deprivation creates compulsion, and how to empower the most disempowered characters. Use practical tools like our “Character Agency Ladder” to drive agency and story.
11. Lesson 13: Character Mapping & Relationships
    Identify your core team of around five to fifteen players and make sure each earns their place in the story. Study the web of relationships through their reciprocal wants and needs. Finish by building a visual character map to guide your scene-building.
12. Lesson 14: The Big Edit 1st Session
    Time to hand over your story for expert review: let’s meet your Big Five publishing editor! Complete the one-page document covering your genre, title, hook, synopsis, central reader question, theme, word count, and deadline, and prepare your optional chapter outline to submit alongside it. This is your first opportunity to see your story the way a publishing editor would.
13. Lesson 15: After Your BE1 Session
    Your first session is done and the notes have arrived. Learn how to take structural feedback on board and turn it into the next draft of your novel.

You’ll interrogate your pacing, perspective, and treatment, to rework chapters, drilling down into sentence structure and word choice, eliminating overwriting line-by-line. Learn how to apply The Lucid Compression Technique© for outstanding prose from the first chapter. Then, it’s time for feedback on your writing.

1. Lesson 16: The Line Edit
   Learn what a line edit involves, and how to read your writing the way an editor reads it on a sentence level.
2. Lesson 17: Pacing
   Condense any slack in your timeline, and test every chapter against three essentials: a reminder of the stakes, new information, and a reason to turn the page. Master the domino effect and foreshadow with intent.
3. Lesson 18: Voice & Perspective
   Find the voice that’s authentically yours, then choose the vantage point that best serves your story. Work through the real differences between first, second, third, and omniscient perspective, and apply some useful rules of thumb to finalize the best POV for your story.
4. Lesson 19: Show, Don’t Tell
   Learn to recognize the hiding places of “telling” from adverb-heavy dialogue tags to backstory and the legitimate tools (exposition, flashback, interiority, dialogue) for feeding readers information without an info-dump.
5. Lesson 20: Dialogue
   Craft true-to-life dialogue that drives drama, reveals conflict, and sounds natural. For conversations that serve the story, give every character their own agenda to break the “ping-pong” rhythm of question-and-answer and cut exposition dumps.
6. Lesson 21: Setting & Scenes
   Decide who’s present, whose point of view we follow, and where each scene is best set to bring the drama. Learn why the problem of your world should be the problem of your character, and how to create atmosphere. Master your set-pieces with detail that grounds a scene.
7. Lesson 22: Overwriting
   Strip your prose of clutter. Diagnose and treat overwriting — the most common weakness in early drafts. Spot symptoms like didactic prose, clichéd expressions, overuse of adverbs, and redundant descriptions. Use our editorial checklist to trim sentence length, cut the fluff, and refine your style.
8. Lesson 23: Sentence Structure
   Master logic flow, active versus passive voice, and the word order that keeps meaning clear. Vary your sentence length to create rhythm. Try our compression drills for pithy, natural sentences. Learn why shorter sentences land harder.
9. Lesson 24: The Word
   Study how repetition, sound, and subliminal patterning shape a story word by word to create your novel’s DNA. Learn how to replace the “weasel” words that dull your prose. Explore word choice as a tool of seduction.
10. Lesson 25: The Lucid Compression Technique©
    Refine your prose with The Novelry's own technique for high-resolution openings: Lucid Compression©. Edit your opening for maximum sensory impact with our secret sauce for award-winning writing.
11. Lesson 26: Punctuation
    Use punctuation to clue the reader into your behind-the-scenes game. Learn how line-level choices operate as instructions to the reader as to what to think and feel and when.
12. Lesson 27: Copy Editing & Proofreading
    Understand the final polish the professionals apply, how to work with tracked changes, and how to sweep your manuscript for errors of grammar, spelling, consistency, and continuity line by line, with fresh eyes.
13. Lesson 28: The First Sentence & the First Chapter
    Craft a first sentence that establishes the voice, signals change, and primes the reader for what’s to come. Use our unique “Thing One/Thing Two” structure to plan your all-important early paragraphs.
14. Lesson 29: The Prologue
    Test your opening against the five ingredients of a prologue, and practice urgency and theme in motion.
15. Lesson 30: Get Feedback
    Get feedback on your writing now with peer critique, a one-on-one editorial session, or a full report.

Your second session with a professional book editor will involve reviewing your pitch letter, synopsis, and first three chapters, and making a plan to enter the publishing process via literary agency representation.

1. Lesson 31: The Query Package
   Assemble the three documents that will win a full-manuscript request: the query letter, the synopsis, and a polished sample of your first three chapters. Master the five elements of a strong query letter — the hook, the story, the market, the agent, the author. Choose great comparison titles, format your manuscript to industry standard, and steer clear of the red flags.
2. Lesson 32: The Market
   Position your novel the way the industry does: on the commercial-to-literary spectrum and within the word-count range expected of your genre.
3. Lesson 33: Literary Agents
   Apply for The Novelry’s submission service or query independently. Build a longlist and shortlist of agents. From tracking responses to interpreting feedback and handling rejection, discover how to assess offers, meet agents, and make the best decisions for your writing career.
4. Lesson 34: Author Career Advice
   Follow the deal from acquisition to publication day: how editors pitch a book internally, how an advance is actually paid out, and why a small advance doesn't mean a small career. Get practical guidance on starting book two, building income beyond royalties, and handling social media and reviews.
5. Lesson 35: The Big Edit 2nd Session
   Guidance to prepare your first three chapters, query letter, and synopsis, formatted to industry standard, and book your Big Edit Second Session with your editor to get your next steps toward publishing.

It is important to tighten the premise of your story into a single sentence, often called the pitch or the hook. This is one of the most important tools when it comes to securing an agent, so we always begin here. We will give you top tips to improve your pitch so that it’s compelling and designed to excite publishers. We also look at your ambition and how your work meets the requirements of your genre for your intended audience, offering ideas on how your novel or memoir might be positioned and its potential within the current market.

You will receive a detailed report of some 20 pages that evaluates every aspect of your entire manuscript, from the writing and the structure to the setting and the characters. We look at both the big picture (such as the narrative arc, plot beats, character arcs, and central questions) as well as the finer details (such as subplots and pacing), offering advice and practical steps so that you can continue to improve your manuscript.

We’ll examine it just as an editor would in a publishing house.

Our manuscript assessment report includes a marked-up manuscript that focuses on the detail of your creative writing, considering what each scene adds to your story, your characters, and your overall plot development. We highlight the best sentences and flag areas for improvement so that you can make sure your story really shines.

For those seeking feedback to make an informed decision as to their next steps, nothing beats the opportunity to have meaningful dialogue with experienced industry professionals connected to the publishing industry worldwide. Writing a novel is a long haul and the least you deserve from a paid service is to enjoy a session where the focus is entirely on you and your manuscript.

You will be invited to book a 45-minute in-person debrief with your editor to discuss their feedback on your creative work. This is an opportunity for you to ask further questions and discuss in detail your writing process onward toward becoming traditionally published. This online meeting is recorded for you to keep and is included as part of your manuscript assessment.

You will receive an action plan with guidance and advice on how to implement our feedback. If your manuscript requires further work, we will include a detailed follow-up plan and offer suggestions for next steps. You can then book any further Paid Feedback Sessions with our editors to work together toward submitting your manuscript to leading literary agencies.

Membership of The Novelry gives writers access to over 60 writing classes a month, including guest events with authors, literary agents, and publishing professionals, plus recorded masterclasses and our writing community of beta readers for ad-hoc feedback. What’s more, you will find yourself supported by other writers like you worldwide who will cheer you on at every step. A published author needs a platform, and The Novelry gets behind each and every writer loud and proud to celebrate their success.

If your manuscript is a match for one of our trusted literary agents, you will be invited to enter our submissions process, in which we submit your manuscript to our trusted literary agencies for representation and publication.