Perfect Pacing for Fiction Writers: Nailing Act One
What you'll learn
- Draw readers in from Chapter One with dynamic pacing.
- Introduce your characters, world, and conflict with flair.
- Create prose that makes your reader need to move on to the next chapter.
Requirements
- Computer with word processing program, pen and paper, or fiction creation tool of writer's choice.
- The first few chapters of your novel or narrative nonfiction work, ready for revision; OR
- A story idea you're ready to write
Description
Course Description
Do you wonder how your favorite novelists create openings that grab you, pull you in, and make you need to read to the next page? In this course, you'll learn how to pace your first chapters with flowing, dynamic prose. Whether you're looking to self-publish or are searching for an agent, editor, or publisher, you'll discover the techniques to build a strong story opening.
Contents and Overview
This course contains thirteen lectures and approximately fifty minutes of video content. In addition, it contains worksheets with practical exercises that you'll apply to your own work.
For those vital opening chapters, I'll teach you what I've learned as an editor. My experiences editing for a New York Times bestselling publisher, and now for independent authors, have shown me the mistakes so many authors make in those first pages. We'll cover three major areas that trip many writers up:
- Introducing characters for the first time
- Confusion between world building and world introduction
- Presenting your story's initial conflict
Each of these areas will be broken down into the following lessons:
- The most common problems writers make
- A case study of an author who's done it well
- Worksheets with exercises to apply to your own story
Whether you have a completed draft that you need to polish, or you're writing down your story for the first time, these techniques will help you create a story with pacing that pulls the reader to the next page.
Who this course is for:
- This course is for writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction who want to create a strong first act to their novel or memoir.
- This course is NOT designed for technical writing, such as manuals, copy, or other nonfiction business writing.
Instructor
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 15 Reviews
- 121 Students
- 1 Course
Faith Van Horne spent three years as an editor for Ellora's Cave, a New York Times bestselling epublisher. Since then, she's worked as a freelance editor, working one-on-one with authors to help them hone their craft. She edits for writers who choose to self-publish, as well as those seeking traditional publication. She's also had a novel and a novella published, as well as numerous short stories. Her own collection of short stories, Super Sargasso, is now available.
She found that she wanted to reach more writers, so she began teaching workshops. Teaching online is an extension of those in-person lectures.