Announcing: My Online Plot Master Class!

I'm pleased to announce that Writers Digest University and I will again be offering an online, eight-week version of my Plot Master Class, starting later this spring!

Goodness, what a clogged sentence. To detangle it, with elements in order of importance:

• Plot Master Class:  An extremely in-depth course on the elements of plotting, including purpose, stakes, structure, subplots, and pacing. The goal is to help you understand the point of your novel, how your plot can and should serve that point, and what revisions you need to do to make that plot as tight and powerful as possible. (My book Second Sight goes into some of this, but the class covers it in much greater depth and detail, and also reflects various revisions in my own thinking on plot since I wrote the book.)
• Online:  You'll read lectures and complete associated exercises interrogating your manuscript and its plot, with the opportunity to ask as many questions of me as you'd like in the online discussions.
• Eight-week: I've taught this class as a one-day workshop at various locations around the country; this course distributes those lessons over eight weeks, allowing participants more time to absorb the material and complete the exercises.
• Starting later this spring:  March 14, to be precise, with homework to be completed before the course begins.
• Writers Digest University and I:  I developed the materials, and Writers Digest University offers the online setting.
• Again:  The current session of the course started in November and is coming to an end now; I've really enjoyed it, and the participants say it's been useful to them!

The most common question I get about this course is "Do I have to have a completed draft of a manuscript?" My instinct is that it will be most useful to people who have completed a first draft of a manuscript and are ready to dig back into it, see what they have, and start polishing it up. (After all, the first exercise is to make an in-depth outline of your current book, and later exercises involve analyzing said outline.) But I've heard from a few past students that they took the course without a completed draft, and it helped them figure out where they wanted to take their books.

If you're interested, please check out the full course description and register here. Any other questions on the course, I'm happy to answer in the comments. Thank you!