Think Sideways–Additional Answers

By Holly Lisle

Wow. A lot of questions about that last post.

Let me answer them here:

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Course Feedback
==============

Some clarification on my “the course will NOT be one-on-one” statement because some is obviously needed. I did not say I wouldn’t be giving feedback. I said I wouldn’t be able to answer individual questions, or to do crits on projects.

I will be answering questions, which is why the first class is going to be very small, and why subsequent classes will also likely be at least fairly small.

In the last lesson of each month, you’ll receive one PDF that is specifically Q&A from the lessons for that month. You’ll mail them to a special e-mail address, I’ll collect and read them all, and answer them in one FAQ sheet that everyone will be able to use. And THAT is why the first class is going to be very small, and why I have to be careful not to take too many people at one time even later. I’ll always be answering questions. Just not one-on-one.

Consider the time this will take if I have even 100 people going through the course and half of them have even one unique question that requires a thoughtful answer per month.

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Lesson Format
============

At the moment, this is the lesson format I’ve hammered out. It isn’t carved in stone, but it’s considerably closer to what I’ll go with than my previous three attempts.

The entire course will include:

  • (6) 10-to-20-minute videos (one per month) introducing concepts, building on previous techniques, and giving an overview of how the current month’s lessons will fit into the process;
  • (24) PDF lessons
  • (18) Technique demonstrations
  • (6) Project synthesis tutorials
  • (6) Project development checklists, one per month
  • (6) Q&A pdfs

Each month, the lessons will run as follows:

WEEK ONE

  • Monthly video
    Note: I’ll have one large file for people with fast connections, and a group of small files for people with slow connections, so one way or another, everyone should be able to download these. Worst case, I’ll create some sort of private area where class members with really cruddy connections can view them on their browsers.
  • PDF lesson
  • Technique demo
     

WEEK TWO

  • PDF lesson
  • Technique demo
     

WEEK THREE

  • PDF lesson
  • Technique demo
     

WEEK FOUR

  • PDF lesson
  • Project synthesis tutorial
  • Project checklist
  • Q&A
     

The entire course will be downloadable, and while you’ll receive one lesson each week, you don’t have to start on them or do them until you’re ready.

My own personal example on this: I’m currently enrolled in a year-long course I don’t have time to work on right now. However, it’s a great course (and was hard to get into), so I’m staying enrolled and downloading every lesson as it becomes available. I’ll get started on it when THE SILVER DOOR is done.

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Lesson Length
============

I’m planning for each lesson to be about 10 content pages long. Unfortunately, I know me, and I know that—aside from novels, where I’m pretty good at hitting planned word lengths—I tend to run over. So for lesson length, figure ten pages, but don’t be surprised if they have a bit more to them than that.

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Virtual Classroom
==============

I’m still debating a “class space” bulletin board where people could work on lessons together if they chose. HOWEVER… moderation takes time if I do it, and it costs extra money if someone else does it, and I’m not sure if it would add enough to the value of the course to be worthwhile. Interacting with other class members will NOT be a required or necessary part of the course.

At the moment, I’m leaning strongly toward NOT including a virtual classroom. Your comments, however, are welcome.

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Criteria For Getting In
=================

“What will be your criteria for getting into the course?”

A fast trigger finger.

At least for the very first class. Registration will open one hour early for priority list members. I strongly suspect, because of its size, that the first class will fill up before general registration opens–if that happens, a sign will go up on the main page saying that the class sold out, and that people who didn’t make it into the first class can sign up for the waiting list and join if someone else cancels. People who are on the Priority list are already on the waiting list (it’s the same list). Individual seats that open up won’t be announced anywhere else.

IF I FIND THAT I CAN COMFORTABLY HANDLE MORE THAN THE SMALL ORIGINAL CLASS SIZE, within a month or two I will set up a second class to allow additional folks in. This is an if, not a promise. I’m very determined not to bite of more than I can chew here, because I’m making a six-month commitment of my time and effort to the people who are taking the course, and if I can’t keep up with the workload, everybody loses.

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Will There Be A Book?
==================

No. This is it. I want to be able to change and update and add things, to keep the Q&A pdfs current, to expand if something cool occurs to me, to add new media if I discover something that will allow me to make points clearer, to help you hit those Ah-HAH! moments faster—and books are lovely, and I love them. But they are static, and not right for this course.

And something that wasn’t asked, but that I’ll answer.

Will those of you who are in the first class be able to receive the updated materials?

Yes.

Will you have to pay extra?

No.

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PRICE
======

Now price, because I know that’s a big deal, and a big concern. And the fact is, I don’t KNOW what to charge. I know I’m planning on splitting the cost across the six months the course will take in order to keep it within the reach of just about everyone.

I know putting the course together is going to be time-and-energy intensive for me, I know this is some of the best stuff I have and it’s all original, based on my life experiences and what I’ve done, and how I’ve learned to use good and bad situations and find opportunities and fix problems in order to stay afloat and published in a very competitive, tough business. Like the little courses I offer through the shop, this isn’t based on anyone’s theory. It’s simply what has worked and what continues to work for me, put into a format you can make work for you.

What is that worth, broken down into six monthly installments? I don’t know, but I’d love to hear your opinions.

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Graduating
=========

Finally, I’m thinking about designing a T-shirt or a mug or something for class graduates—a sort of class ring for the Sideways Thinkers of the world. You could buy it through Cafe Press or something like it. Is that a dumb idea?

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Think Sideways—Here’s What I’m Putting Together

By Holly Lisle

Thank you so much for the comments on the Think Sideways demo video. Your suggestions have been hugely helpful.

  • I now have an earclip headset with a microphone that only makes me look a little like a Borg.
     
  • In order to eliminate the handwriting time-lag, I’ll prewrite sections of the whiteboard and do closeups using Photo-to-Movie, which I’ve owned for years and have been looking for a good excuse to put to use. I’ll add in drawings in real time. I like live drawing because of its immediacy, and the fact that it lets you engage directly with your viewer.
     
  • There will be a few clips of me, but frankly, watching people talk in videos is dull, and I hate seeing myself talk, so you’ll see me for intros, and maybe conclusions, and that’s about it.
     
  • PowerPoint slides are what you do to people you don’t like. They induce comas in lab rats. They deplete oxygen in rooms, causing CO2 overload and unconsciousness in those nearby, and are under investigation by the EPA. The Geneva Convention lists them specifically as a means of torture, and prohibits their use. (Okay, I just really hate them. No PowerPoint slides.)
     
  • I will, however, look into Keynote. I make no promises. In general, canned slide presentations bore me.

What “How To Think Sideways” Will Be

The videos, however, are simply a small portion of what I have planned. I’ve mentioned before that this is going to be a big course—the first one I’ve ever done. So far, I have 32 pages of just brainstorming notes. That doesn’t include example lists, demo lists, exercise lists, and so on.

I owe Thinking Sideways for my career, and for a lot of other things that have worked out well in my life. It is the single most important skill I have. Well, collection of skills. From an ungodly number of entries; data points; questions to myself; and dissections of how I got from Point A to Point B in sticky situations, through complex problems, and past just plain hard times, I’ve winnowed out 18 specific problem-creating, problem-complicating, and problem-solving skills I’ve used to create characters, develop and write books, plan series, change genres, maintain a business while maintaining creativity, and help my kids grow up right. (The first lesson, in fact, will start with my two older kids and me sitting in an interrogation room in the Fayetteville police station in December, 1994, after the two of them caused a 15-man undercover police stake-out at the Cross Creek Mall. They were at the time 9 and 11 years old. This is, believe it or not, completely relevant to both writing AND thinking sideways.) You’ll learn and apply all eighteen of these skills.

I’ve also figured out and will teach you five ways I combine those skills to find new angles of approach to particularly tough problems. AND four thought patterns you must lose immediately in order to be able to think sideways. (I had to rid myself of all four of them, so I know that it can be done, and I know how to do it.)

I figure (please correct me if I’m off base here) that what you need from a course like this would be:

  • Usable skills
  • applied to salable projects
  • presented in a fluff-free, entertaining, and immediately applicable fashion
  • for a reasonable price.
  •  

So at this point, I’m planning on 24 weekly lessons that will teach you the skills you need to:

  • Develop both creative ideas and salable ideas, and recognize how to put the two together;
  • Develop presentations that will appeal to agents, editors, the marketing department, and finally readers, (who never get to see all your hard work if you can’t hit the first three);
  • Write the book while maintaining quality, delivering what you promised, and hitting your deadline;
  • Identify the key marketing components of your work and present them in the best possible light to the people who need them, while letting those people do their jobs;
  • Connect with your audience (or know when you shouldn’t); and…
  • Move on to the next project, while dealing with the numbers, either good or bad, and success or failure of the previous one.
     

You will create a project as your course homework. (Well, you will if you DO the homework. That’s entirely up to you.) You’ll start applying the techniques immediately, and you’ll either write a novel, a nonfiction book, a series of short stories, or some project unrelated to writing—the techniques I’ll be teaching are applicable to any sort of creative endeavor.

What ” How To Think Sideways” Will NOT Be

With that said, this course WILL NOT teach you how to write. I have a bunch of courses already written that teach the essentials of plotting, characterization, worldbuilding, scene development, and organization. HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS truly is a course that teaches thinking: creative problem solving directed toward problems of creativity. There will not be any “how to write a scene” or “how to create a character” or “how to plot” walkthroughs included.

The course will not be one-on-one. In order to keep the price down (and because I just don’t have the time to answer individual questions or read and crit projects) it will operate in the same do-it-yourself format as the small courses I offer in the shop. I will put everything I have into making sure you have clear demos, lots of examples, easy-to-follow instructions, and good direction for your project, but my assistance will be limited to technical issues: making sure you get working copies of each lesson, and tracking down and fixing bugs that you find.

I may offer separate tutoring, but this would cost significantly more, would only be open to a handful of students at a time, and I’m not sure if I could do it at all because of the possibility of tutoring cutting into my writing time. I have not yet committed to this idea.

Seats Will Be Limited

For the first class, they will be severely limited, because I have not done something of this nature before and I’m not sure how much time technical support will take.

I do not know how often I’ll be able to open registration, either. Depending on the amount of work involved with maintaining the course, doing necessary upgrades and technical fixes, and so on, and depending on my book deadlines, it could be twice a year. Or once a year. I don’t know what to expect yet. I do know I need to put together another proposal for Scholastic when I finish THE SILVER DOOR, and I need to write “C”.

So those are the caveats. I know this course won’t be for everyone. I am making every effort to make it suitable for writers from Absolute Beginner to Pro Who Needs A New Genre, but with lessons at one per week, it will be pretty intensive—a lot of things to learn, a lot to apply.

Comments?

Questions?

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


How To Think Sideways — The Writer’s Job

By Holly Lisle

I’m testing the tools I’ll be using to put together the How To Think Sideways course. Along with PDFs and perhaps some MP3s, I’m planning on adding video to this course. The following is JUST A TEST. While I hope you find the little clip interesting, and while it does set up one of the three big problems that thinking sideways solves, it isn’t intended to do much more than let you see a bit of what I’m planning, and let ME find out if it works for you.

There are some complications (aside from my husband hating the way the video looks, because it stretches my face sideways). So after you’ve watched the video, I have some questions for you.

Beating Head On Wall

Freaking survey isn’t working. OF course.

Survey Gizmo is WORTHLESS. Please just post any problems you had with the video, or any comments about it, here. Or e-mail me.

Questions

Did the video work on your computer?

Was the sound quality okay? Was it loud enough (or could you make it loud enough)?

Could you read my handwriting, or do I need to come up with another way of entering text when I got to the whiteboard?

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Memorial Day

By Holly Lisle

Ben Stein says:

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad. The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

My Air Force Kid is home safe from the desert, and I’ll get to see him soon. I am thankful today, and I’m taking time out to remember each mother’s kid who did not come home, and each kid’s dad or mom, each brother or sister. Those who volunteer to defend us, and those who died doing it, deserve more than a single day of remembrance.

Thank you.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Another Newsletter Question

By Holly Lisle

When people drop out of the Writing Updates newsletter, (and take the time to tell me why), it’s almost always because I’m sending more newsletters than they can read.

As you can see from my 400+ emails post the other day, I DO understand the problem, and I don’t want to contribute to someone else feeling as flattened by relevant e-mails as I do.

So here’s a poll. Please let me know how often you could get and actually read and use the Writing Updates newsletter.

You should be able to see the results this time, so you’ll know how it’s going.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this and vote on it.

How often should I mail out the HLWU newsletter?
Once every other week
Once a week
Twice a week
  
pollcode.com free polls

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


400+ Emails Behind

By Holly Lisle

I am now, officially, 400+ real, genuine, “I need to write to these people” emails behind. It was with the weight of those offers of assistance, requests for help, questions about writing, and so on, that I read this post about the miracle of communication… and its costмебели.

And I understand. I damn near cried.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Wednesday From the Mini-Vacation

By Holly Lisle

Have done no writing yet. But my youngest does stop-motion videos, and he and I put together his most recent one–a process that took four days and about twenty hours.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


More About “C” In Its Current Incarnation

By Holly Lisle

First a note on “Genie In a Bottle.” I got it wrong, but I was in a bookstore that didn’t have the book, and I was working from memory.

I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I’ll learn from anyone who can teach me. There’s a screenplay writer named Blake Snyder who wrote a book called Save The Cat! It’s strictly about screenwriting, it’s about his method of categorizing screenplay genres and developing screenplays, and all of this fits within the rigid format of the commercial screenplay. If you read it thinking it applies word for word to writing novels, you’ll end up wearing an unnecessary straightjacket while you write.

But if you remember that you as a novelist are not in any way constrained by the three-act, 110-page format with strict A and B stories screenwriters must follow (if they hope to sell), it becomes one of the best guides to good storytelling I’ve ever come across. And it was by sitting in the bookstore working out the beats of a screenplay from (admittedly poor) memory that I figured out how to redo “C” so that it would work as a story.

Snyder takes you through ten genres he’s come up with–ways of categorizing stories. Again, novels are MUCH more flexible than what he presents for screenwriters, but again, if you keep that in mind, you’ll find that most of what you’ve written either fits pretty well into one of his ten genres, or you’re stuck on it because it isn’t working as a story.

So that’s a long way of saying that my “Genie in the Bottle” note at the top of the page is my misremembering of his classification of “Out of the Bottle” stories, of which “C” is (more or less) one. “C”, however, fuses elements of “Rite of Passage” stories (another of his genres), which I can do because I’m writing a novel, and which probably wouldn’t work too well for a screenwriter because I have the glorious elbow room of 100,000 words in which to create A, B, C, and D stories, themes and subthemes, and because, writing a novel, I don’t have to worry a bit about budgets, special effects, being rewritten by credit jumpers, or any of the other miseries that await screenwriters.

In any case, “C” does involve time travel. It knowingly breaks some very specific and nearly universal rules of time travel stories. Because I know the rules, and have a critical REASON WHY, I think I can get away with it, but we’ll see.

“C” doesn’t have anything to do with Cadence Drake or Badger. I haven’t given up on them, but they’re not what are keeping me up nights.

And… I’m having a wonderful time working this all out. Thank you, and thanks for letting me know about your secret projects. They’re exciting stuff, and I hope you have as much fun with yours as I’m having with mine.

As for what I’m doing online at this hour on Mother’s Day… we’re under a tornado watch, and Matt stayed up for hours watching the weather. I’m standing watch now so he can catch a few hours’ sleep.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


“C” is BACK!

By Holly Lisle

Every writer needs to have a secret project, I think. Something that you’re revved about, something that drives you completely crazy, something that you keep on the hard drive and tinker with and dream about and work on when you’re stuck on the things that are paying you money.

I’ve had a number of secret projects. One became Fire In The Mist, one became Glenraven, one became Midnight Rain.

And this one is “C”. They always have to have a code name, you see. That’s part of the fun. The code name, the sense of mission, the fact that this is something that you’re writing just for you. (Though of course you’ll try to sell it when you’re done; let’s not get crazy.)

Well, “C” has been sitting on the hard drive for a good long time now, ignored while I wrote to deadlines and wrote courses, and I’d pretty much forgotten about it. And then…

Two days ago, I went into the bookstore to wait while my guys went shopping for a Mother’s Day present for me. I didn’t want to read anything, though, didn’t want to look at books, wandered up and down the aisles feeling restless, not seeing the covers of anything on the shelves, just pacing and trying not to be too obtrusive about it. I landed in front of the blank book section, on a whim picked up two large Moleskine notebooks (Hemmingway used them, you know, and they won’t ever let you forget it, either.) Have never owned a Moleskine notebook—my usual notebook costs about a buck and a half at Wal-Mart.

But I went over to the little sit-around-eating-expensive-pastry section of the bookstore and bought a bottled water so I wouldn’t be taking up one of their tables without spending any money on their stuff, and peeled the plastic wrappers off my new notebooks, and opened them up. Sniffed the pages. (Yeah, I’m a page-sniffer.) For the record, Moleskines smell better than Wal-Mart notebooks. For the price you pay, they damned well ought to.

Got out a pen. No clue what I was going to write, but I wanted to put ink on paper. The restlessness was very sure this was what I wanted to do.

And the little voice in the back of my head whispered “C”.

I thought, Why not? It was stuck, it had gone silent on me, but there was still something about it that itched between my shoulder blades and right behind my eyeballs, and I had to think there was something about that story that was worth writing.

c-clusterSo I started with a cluster diagram.

And I started with a question. I got a lot of ideas.

These converted into the better part of one written outline done sitting at that little table at the bookstore, and then a complete second draft outline, very different from the first one (and from the stuff I clustered, which is why I’m willing to post that) which I wrote down in a two-hour white heat yesterday.

I never knew the middle of the story before. I had vague ideas about the ending. Now I have all of that, and I know HOW and I know the REASON WHY. And I can see all the pieces, and how all the pieces interlock.

“Excited” does not begin to describe me at the moment.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


How To Write Page-Turning Scenes Is LIVE

By Holly Lisle

How To Write Page-Turning Scenes The course is done, it’s in the shop, and it’s available now.

So… what’s in Page-Turning Scenes?

  • The two critical parts EVERY scene must have? (Page 13)
     
  • The FIVE types of conflict that will make writing your stories easier, and keep your readers hooked. (Page 14)
     
  • The short, simple story PLAN technique that will keep you from writing the wrong book. (page 16)
     
  • The TWO absolutes that apply to every form of conflict and every scene. (page 23)
     
  • The special scene technique that lets you grab your reader’s attention and totally mislead him WITHOUT cheating.(page 25)
     
  • The great conflict trick that lets your reader see something go wrong, and know it’s gone wrong, and makes him NEED to keep reading to find out why. (page 26)
     
  • Internal conflict that shows your reader your hero’s anguish–and that makes him empathize–WITHOUT resorting to a bad replay of Hamlet’s monologue. (page 28)
     
  • 28 types of conflict between your characters that AREN’T arguing. (page 33)
     
  • Conflict between characters on the same side of your issue. (page 35)
     
  • The ONE kind of conflict that can provide your entire story and everyone in it with a reason to go on. (page 37)
     
  • The way to know which are good scenes and which are bad scenes BEFORE you write them. (page 43)
     
  • An answer to the problem of TOO MANY ideas. (page 58)
     
  • The easiest way to spread out the good stuff over an entire book, and not show your whole hand in just one scene. (page 60)
     
  • A step-by-step method for getting your hero OUT of the corner you got him stuck in. (page 64)
     
  • Straightforward directions on how to dump your boring scenes while identifying and saving what matters in them. (page 71)
     
  • TWO simple, fun, easy ways to write in "breathers" for your readers that DON’T include letting them put the book down. (page 75)
     
  • Five ways to write scenes that suck readers in even when your story is NOT about life-or-death issues. (page 81)
     
  • TWO types of great transitions that will spice up your pages and let you leap all of time and space (or as much of it as you need to) in two sentences? Just two. (page 86)
     
  • The SIMPLE way to use flashbacks, flashforwards, dream sequences, and other scenes that jump your story through time. (page 91)
     
  • THE FOUR SECRETS to when and how you’ll use step-by-step action to make your scene gripping, urgent, and must-read…and when you must NEVER use step-by-step action. (page 92)
     
  • The FIVE STEPS to misdirecting most of your readers most of the time? (Though Abraham Lincoln was right. You CAN’T fool all of the people all the time.) (page 95)
     
  • The FOUR ways to choose the right viewpoint character for every scene. (page 98)
     
  • The HOW, WHEN, and WHY behind introducing and using secondary characters. (page 100)
     
  • SEVEN ways for getting real emotion from your head into the scene. (page 107)
     
  • The dialogue technique that will save you (and your readers) from the dreaded Talking Heads Syndrome. (page 107)
     
  • Description that readers NEED, that creates OPPORTUNITIES for plot twists, and that keeps your story moving without EVER bogging it down. (page 109)
     
  • The FIVE senses–plus any others you can invent–used the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. (page 112)

I’ve kept it as lean and to the point, I’ve done everything in my power to answer every question you asked, and I think you’ll be excited by what it can help you do with your writing.

Pick Up Your Copy Now

E-book, 118 pages, and lots of techniques, explanations, examples, and exercises to show you EXACTLY how to make your scenes compelling, exciting, and critical to your story.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved