How to Think Sideways Sample
How To Think Sideways is an intensive course combining mentorship with coursework to build and develop your writing career into a sustainable, long-term vocation. You get to learn from Holly’s mistakes (see some of the proposals that sold and the ones that didn’t) and successes over her career, and take the steps you need towards publication.
Download a free sample of How to Think Sideways
(How to Think Sideways Sample includes an excerpt from Lesson 1, plus two downloadable modules so that you can see how the system works.)
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Registration through the “front door” of Think Sideways is sometimes limited to 200 students at a time.
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Open the How To Think Sideways Subscription Page in a new tab or window. Scroll past any notices indicating when the next registration opens. Click here to access a text file with the codes you’ll need to sign up. Hit the back button on your browser to return to this page when you’re finished.
Sideways Thinking curriculum
Section 1: Ideas
Lesson 1
How to Break the Four “Thinking” Barriers that have stood in the way of your success in the past
Lesson 2
Discover your own “genre” that you can use wherever you choose to go in the publishing world
Lesson 3
How to Generate Ideas On a Deadline
Lesson 4
How to Recognize and Build On Good Ideas – figure out which ideas are worth writing, and learn how to improve your keepers.
Section 2: Project Planning
Lesson 5
How to Define Your Project’s Needs
Lesson 6
How to Discover (or Create) Your Project’s Market
Lesson 7
How to Develop Your Personal Project System
Lesson 8
How to Plan Your Project While NOT Killing Your Story
Section 3: First Chapters
Lesson 9
How to Write From Inside Your Story
Lesson 10
How to “Plan” Surprises that Surprise Even You
Lesson 11
How to Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, and Sample Chapters
Lesson 12 How to Create, Complicate, and Solve Problems
Section 4: Middles
Lesson 13
Maintaining your enthusiasm for your manuscript
Lesson 14
How to Find and Use Your “Planned” Surprises
Lesson 15
How to “Hire” Spies, and Why Your Project Needs Them
Lesson 16
How to Assess Your Progress and Make any Corrections before you go off track
Section 5: Endings
Lesson 17
How to Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, and Artists, and Not Wreck Your Project.
Lesson 18
How to Find the RIGHT Ending
Lesson 19
How to Bend Your Plan Without Breaking It
Lesson 20
How to Write the Ending That Sells the Next Book
Section 6: Wrap Up/Start Again
Lesson 21
How to work with editors and others in the publishing industry. Learn the “rules” that can make the difference between living the dream or fighting a nightmare.
Lesson 22
How to Plan Your Revision
Lesson 23
How to keep the parts of the book that must be in there for it to be the book you wrote (and identify what needs to be fixed)
Lesson 24
How to Deliver What You Promised and What They Want On Deadline
Lesson 25
How to NOT Be a One-Book Wonder—Learn to Produce Repeatable Results. The secret to being able to write the books you want to write and keep selling them year in and year out.
Bonus course:
How Not to Write a Series and Why You Don’t Want To
Lesson 26
Why Write a Stand-Alone Instead of a Series
Lesson 27
That’s Why… What About HOW?
Lesson 28
The Ending Before THE END
Lessons are delivered to your private student page once per week/fortnight (depending on the course duration you’ve chosen). You work at your own pace, there is no pressure to finish each lesson before the next arrives. They will always be available when you are ready.
In addition, you get:
A monthly video introducing you to the month’s big concept
Weekly technique demos
A monthly checklist of all the steps you take to work your way through that portion of the system
A monthly Q&A of questions students have asked about the course on the board
Private workgroups of no more than 20 students, where you can (IF you choose—the workgroups are entirely optional) brainstorm with colleagues
And a private class discussion board where you can network and research
Also included:
A selection of proposals – both successful and unsuccessful, so that you can see what worked and what didn’t. Learn directly from these mistakes instead of repeating them yourself.
A selection of editor and agent critiques.
First drafts and final drafts of published books, including one brutal line-per-scene analysis.
A selection of worldbuilding and development notes, sketches, and maps, to give you a feel for the way things change as project development goes along.
Copies of brainstorming sessions from first drafts.
Holly says, “…before I learned how to do this right and then spent 17 years doing that, I spent seven years learning an amazing number of ways to do the job wrong. I’ll steer you around my many, many mistakes while getting you to the system, techniques, and processes that work.”
