How to Think Sideways – Writing Career Development Course

How To Think Sideways is an intensive 28 lesson course designed to build and develop your writing career into a sustainable, long-term vocation. You get to learn from Holly Lisle’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.

Plus, new in 2011, are two new components: an indepth “walkthrough” of the book the author is currently writing, and a student “hotseat” for each lesson where a student gets an opportunity to brainstorm problems via Skype. I’ve personally already found these new features extremely valuable.

And additionally, following the bestselling success of self-published author John Locke, Holly has made the decision to leave her publisher and strike out on her own following Locke’s guidelines. Going forward, from Lesson 6, she will cover everything she does to self-publish her own books in electronic format.

This means you get the best of both worlds: she has already outlined the optimal way to a writing career via the traditional publishing route, and you will also receive the step-by-step process for self-publishing and marketing e-books. Try both routes and decide for yourself. You can’t lose.

Download a free sample of Think Sideways or sign up now.

Sideways Thinking Curriculum:

Ideas

• How to Break the Four Barriers that have stood in the way of your success in the past
• Discover your own “genre” that you can use wherever you choose to go in the publishing world
• How to Generate Ideas On a Deadline
• How to Recognize and Build On Good Ideas – figure out which ideas are worth writing, and learn how to improve your keepers.

Project Planning

• How to Define Your Project’s Needs
• How to Discover (or Create) Your Project’s Market
• How to Develop Your Personal Project System
• How to Plan Your Project While NOT Killing Your Story

First Chapters

• How to Write From Inside Your Story
• How to “Plan” Surprises that Surprise Even You
• How to Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, and Sample Chapters
• How to Create, Complicate, and Solve Problems

Middles

• Maintaining your enthusiasm for your manuscript
• How to Find and Use Your “Planned” Surprises
• How to “Hire” Spies, and Why Your Project Needs Them
• How to Assess Your Progress and Make any Corrections before you go off track

Endings

• How to Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, and Artists, and Not Wreck Your Project.
• How to Find the RIGHT Ending
• How to Bend Your Plan Without Breaking It
• How to Write the Ending That Sells the Next Book

Wrap Up/Start Again

• 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.
• How to Plan Your Revision
• 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)
• How to Deliver What You Promised and What They Want On Deadline
• 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.

How Not to Write a Series and Why You Don’t Want To

• Why you should write a stand-alone book instead of a series
• How to incorporate your series ideas into only one book
• The Ending Before THE END

Lessons are delivered to your private student page once per week. 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

Optional: Private workgroups of no more than 20 students, where you can brainstorm with peers

Optional: Private class discussion board where you can network and research

NEW 2011 ADDON to the course: The Course Walkthrough

Holly is writing a novel right now and documenting how she uses the Think Sideways process to create this particular novel.

She will go through every lesson as she writes and demonstrate the lesson, tools and techniques, various worksheets, plus any new processes that may arise.

You’ll get the pages of her Novel Notebook, worksheets, outlines, background development, and more…

You’ll get an easy to follow audio talk-through of each page, explaining the what, why, and how of the planning and writing process, problems Holly is having, and how she’ll fix them.

You’ll get copies of new worksheets and demos in PDF, MP3 and other formats as they are presented, plus transcripts so you can go back later and read the material.

You get to look over the author’s shoulder via classroom videos as she draws maps and diagrams story ideas and plans out characters, plots, background, and more (you’ll see the drawing created live and hear explanations of what she’s doing)

You’ll get discussion questions and techniques for student-suggested writing problems via the students-only walkthrough board.

And you’ll get access to one video Hotseat for every lesson, where a Think Sideways student has an opportunity to discuss a problem s/he is having with his or her story, then brainstorm story ideas for up to one hour to get that student writing. This is where you get to watch beginners and intermediate writers figure out, with techniques, how to write the stories THEY want to write.

If you sign up soon (i.e., before the end of this walkthrough process, which is estimated to take about a year), you may get a chance to BE one of those lucky hotseat students!

Students who have seen the existing Hotseats frequently express amazement at how helpful these Hotseats are, and how they answer questions the viewing students had about their own writing.

The inclusion of this new walkthrough has increased the price of the course, but it is well worth it.

SECOND 2011 ADD-ON:

The author will disect John Locke’s guidelines for achieving best-selling e-book success and apply it to her own project to self-publish the e-books of several of her out-of-print books. You get to follow and learn from her progress.

Also included is a Self-Publishers Resource Forum where she anticipates content producers will advertise
their services and explain and/or demonstrate what they can do for self-publishing writers, and potentially offer discounts, due to the clout of a community of around 3000 writers.

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.”

Sign up for How To Think Sideways