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Welcome to the WLT Second Chances sale! From now until December 31, 2022, we’re releasing 10 of the year’s best classes for a limited time. These classes include everything from fiction writing for beginners, turning your personal experiences into fiction, self publishing in 2022, writing about your own creative work, and more.
NOTE: This is not a live class registration. When you register, you’ll be receiving access to previously recorded classes taught for a live audience. Registration includes access to any handouts, readings, and slides the instructor originally shared with students. The videos will be available for viewing immediately upon purchase, and will expire on March 31, 2023.
Descriptions for each class recording can be found below. To purchase access to the recordings, all you need to do is add your preferred tickets to your cart and check out. You’ll then receive an email with a link to the class recordings and any class materials.
Improving your fiction writing is not unlike improving yourself. It takes discipline, honesty, and a certain amount of grace.
In this crash course on craft, we’ll explore how style, tone, setting, and voice impact your work. We’ll also give you tips and exercises to get better at each of them. We’ll dig deeper into conflict, word choice, and how to manipulate language to make it do what we want. We’ll talk about the difference in writing styles, the effect they have on readers, and how you can find your own style, or improve on the one you already have. This class is about the joy and passion of language and the beautiful things it can do.
What students had to say about the class:
A good opening is the key to unlocking the rest of the story. This class is intended to give writers useful strategies and techniques for starting a novel.
Sometimes writing the opening of a novel can seem a daunting challenge, an obstacle to writing the rest of the book, especially when the long-arc of the novel seems to be stretching off into the invisible distance. But a well-written opening can actually help you structure and outline the rest of the story, and the process of writing an opening offers a writer the opportunity to explore the story’s main ideas.
We’ve all heard that an opening needs to “pull a reader into the story,” but what exactly does this mean, and how do you do it? Should you begin with character? Plot? Setting? Theme? A short sentence? A long winding sentence? We’ll look at a variety of published examples of effective openings, and we’ll do some brief in-class writing assignments to identify ways to figure out what kind of opening may work best for your novel. We’ll look at how research can be helpful not only for finding useful content for an opening, but also for providing new ideas for new stories. Also, we’ll discuss how the opening of a novel is in dialogue with other parts of the novel.
Often when the ending of a novel isn’t working, it’s not because of the ending itself, but because something in the beginning of the story still isn’t fully developed. Knowing how to revise the opening can help make your whole novel feel like it is arising organically out of the opening pages.
What students had to say about the class:
A scene can be simply defined as characters doing something in a particular place at a particular time. Vivid scenes allow the reader to live in the world of your story, forge a deep connection with your characters, and become so enthralled with the action they can’t wait to turn the page. In short, well-crafted scenes make your work memorable.
In this class for writers of fiction, we will analyze a few complete scenes from literature and use the same elements to craft our own scenes from beginning to end. We’ll discuss how to enter and stage a scene, how to introduce conflict and create tension, how to lengthen a scene so that we can do more with less, how to make the scene come alive on the page, and how to exit a scene on the right note. We will also have a chance to discuss our struggles with writing good scenes and brainstorm ideas to get past our blocks. The goal is to go home with a draft of a scene that can become an anchor for crafting more scenes.
What students had to say about the class:
There are many metaphors for a book. It can feel like a world unto itself, conjured like magic, or a living and breathing animal with a life of its own. It can be a vehicle that transports or a doorway that pulls us in.
Sometimes, we may be tempted to not approach our novels with a clinical mind; if we pull out an x-ray machine or open up the hood, if we start diagramming and labeling, could we damage the spirit of the book? I say no! Successful novels need both the messy magic of our subconscious as well as our own inner auto mechanic. We need a familiarity with the parts to make sure they are all working together for the most harmonious whole. In this class, we’ll open up the hoods of our novels to see if all the parts are running at their best. First, we’ll look at our point of view choices and the “clock” of our novel. Then we’ll move on to discussing throughlines and arcs. Finally, we’ll take a look at just a portion of the many organizing structures used in fiction. By the end of the class, you’ll see your work in progress more clearly and have the tools for your future repairs!
What students had to say about the class:
Starting a memoir and looking for strategies for generating material and finding structure?
The most haunting memoirs aren’t just autobiographies. Instead, they pivot on a subject that mystifies and confounds the writer, about which they cannot quite make up their mind.
In this class, you’ll begin to mine your life for material and work through a series of generative prompts designed to turn rich, messy fragments into surprising and powerful prose. We’ll steal liberally from the sensory world of poetry, the narrative world of fiction, and the fact-driven world of journalism, even as we plumb the depths of interior life. Along the way, you’ll learn how to build a strong narrative arc, write vivid scenes, and prioritize the details and images that make prose come alive.
What students had to say about the class:
Do you have personal stories you want to fictionalize?
People we’ve known, moments we’ve witnessed, conversations we’ve overheard, places we’ve been: these influence aspects of our fiction. Sometimes, a whole experience is so profound, we decide to use that memory as inspiration for a story. But how does a writer free herself from the restrictions of facts in order to follow craft requirements for producing meaningful art? This class will introduce techniques for identifying appropriate material and then adapting it for fiction. Personal examples will be shared, and participants will be guided through a sample exercise.
What students had to say about the class:
Writing about our own writing is one of the hardest—but most vital skills for aspiring authors and published authors alike.
In this class, author of 5 books and noted book coach Courtney Maum will teach you how to look at your body of work like an editor and promote yourself as a capable, talented and professional writer any gatekeeper would be lucky to work with. We’ll look specifically at query letters, artist statements and bios, and also talk about pitching your work out loud.
What students had to say about the class:
The best methods for releasing a self-published book change radically every year.
Whether you are working on your very first book or are about to launch your latest title, in this class we will review:
What students had to say about the class:
Pantsing your way to becoming a full-time author is not an option.
You need a plan–one that considers the emotional and logistical implications of leaving behind the stability of your 9 to 5, as well as the financial safety nets necessary to make it work long-term. In this 3-hour class, we’ll cover considerations, safeguards, and the timing of your transition, as well as help you find answers to some of your most pressing questions like, “How much money should I have saved before I quit my job to become a full-time author?” and “How often should I sell new projects in order to create a financially sustainable career?” There will be time for individual planning, as well as a short Q&A following each section of the presentation. Attendees will receive a copy of the 100-slide presentation , which will be full of valuable information and additional resources.
What students had to say about the class:
Learn what goes into a proposal, why and when you need it, and how to write one that stands out.
In this three-hour class, Cinelle Barnes will share not only the basics of proposal writing but a decade’s worth of essential takeaways from her work as an author and editor of several nonfiction books, a book coach to several essayists and memoirists, a screener and judge for various literary contests and submissions calls, and a former grant and proposal writer for a global organization.
She’ll help you understand what an editor or agent might look for in a proposal, what kinds of information or language will help you stand out, how to organize and format your particular proposal for greater impact, and how to go from promising idea to deliverable concept. Using a slide presentation, worksheets, and excerpts from real (acquired, rejected, and in-progress) book proposals of her own, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes tour of how Cinelle has honed her proposal writing skills over time… resulting in several published books and maximal, compounding returns.
What students had to say about the class:
