Writing a Nonfiction How-To Book – Mary Marvella
We’ll use Mind Mapping and other brainstorming. We will explore the elements that make up a successful book.
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$35.00
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We’ll use Mind Mapping and other brainstorming. We will explore the elements that make up a successful book.
In four weeks, we’ll walk this walk together, evaluating what can go and what needs to stay, changing verbs, revising sentences, giving up adverbs (hardest thing for me!), trimming descriptions, catching when characters babble, and limiting dialogue tags.
In this two-week class, we’ll start building and developing your brand so that you offer readers and the media a consistent presence online.
We will cover:
What is Backstory?
Flashbacks and How to Use Them,
The Five Ws of Backstory—Who, What, Where, When and Why—of a character’s past.
Prologues—how to use a prologue to provide backstory.
Dialogue—how to manipulate your readers by using a character’s dialogue to hint at backstory.
Weaving—how to weave backstory into your story.
Inner Thought—revealing your character’s backstory through inner thought.
What Do They Want?—how your character’s backstory can affect his goals.
The New Way to Plot: Using backstory to plot your novel
By the end of the two weeks, you’ll be able to write your truth from an engaging and authentic author voice.
Students could have a working outline for a memoir/autobiography and a good portion of a rough draft by the end of the month and the instructor’s guidance after the class ends.
In Successful Book Launches you’ll learn-
How to start thinking about promotion before you even begin writing
How to create a promotion timeline
How to figure out who your audience really is and the best way to reach them
How to book yourself on podcasts, blogs and book review sites.
We will cover:
The basics—vital statistics, names, age, voice, and the character interview.
The Place They Call Home—the space and how to define what it means to the character,
This is the Moment - Backstory—Using the 5 Ws—Who, What, Where, When and Why—of an incident or incidents that most significantly affected the character.
Who’s Talking Now? Dialogue—how dialogue and dialect can define a character.
Body Language—how your character’s body can show what he’s feeling, and what he might want to hide.
But Why Do They Do It?—how idiosyncrasies and odd habits shape your characters.
Clothes Make the Man—or Woman!—How a person’s dress reveals who they are.
Action and Reaction—How a character’s actions and others’ reactions to them reveal character.
What Matters Most?—How the things your characters care about the most can shape them.
The Supporting Cast – Secondary Characters
We will take a journey through the differences between fan fic and “published” works, the differences between tropes here and tropes there, and also what the secret ingredient is that can make your writing pop directly into the hearts and minds of readers.
In this two-week class, we’ll go through the nitty gritty of promotion and marketing and by the end you should be able to successfully handle your own book marketing.
How do you know if you need an editor or not? Mary Marvella will teach you all about when you need an editor and when you don't. She'll also give some handy editing tips.
That doesn’t mean characters in romantic comedy don’t have problems similar to those in contemporary romance. It’s that the situations and the things that result from the way they handle things are different. The dialog shifts.
In this workshop, we’ll talk about the structure of the romantic journey (based on the Hero’s Journey framework) and how it is the bones of a solid relationship story.
In this class you’ll learn what podcasts, blogs, and other print and online publications look for when they go hunting for a story.
You’ll also learn how to approach them for best results.
In this class, we will work on ways to use small conflicts to keep a story moving.
Why compete in a saturated market?
In this class we’ll look at alternative ways to sell your work, everything from lesser-known bookselling sites to setting up your own bookstore.
First, we need to work out why certain tropes attract readers and what their expectations are. Then this workshop will discuss subverting tropes and reinventing approaches, without losing emotional buy-in from the reader.
If you’re like most writers, you’ve probably taken a number of classes and read even more about writing snappy dialogue. That’s not this class. This class will focus on using dialogue to define your fictionals.
Learn how to make your villain the best he/she can be!
In this workshop, we’ll drill down into the different facets of your characters’ emotional arc and how it is both the spine (structure) and heart (feelings) of your story.
