Writing the Breakout Novel

Discover what makes a novel stand out from the rest in all its aspects—from premise to plot to character to theme—using Donald Maass’ bestselling Writing the Breakout Novel as your guide. Breakout novels are built from the foundation up, beginning with a breakout premise which is plausible, original, emotional, and rich in conflicts to explore … and which will inspire and guide you as you build on that foundation. This workshop, then, will begin with the premise and build over eight weeks just as the breakout novel builds: with careful attention to craft and an openness to those creative leaps which will make your novel exceptional.

Course level: Intermediate

Required Book:  Writing the Breakout Novel and Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass

Workshop Length: 8 weeks

Tuition: $349.00 ($314.10 for VIP)

Start Date: View Writing the Breakout Novel Course Schedule

Course Structure
The workshop will consist of eight one-week sessions. Each session will include online lectures (text based), associated textbook reading assignments, and creative writing and exercises submitted to the instructor for private review. In addition, the course provides a number of interactive venues through which you might further the conversation with your peers and advance the cause of the course as community.

You will learn:

  • To formulate a premise that provides fertile ground for your imagination and craft
  • To create believable and complex characters and conflicts
  • To raise your novel’s stakes and tension to keep your plots, and your readers, moving forward
  • To integrate subplots and advanced plot structures into a compelling and complete narrative

Who should take this course:

  • Fiction writers who have always dreamed of writing a successful novel
  • Graduates of other beginner / intermediate level workshops
  • Writers who want to work with a Published Author to understand the key elements of creating a breakout novel

Register for Writing the Breakout Novel Writing Workshop

Course Outline

Session One: Premise

  • Reconciling plausibility and originality
  • The importance of inherent conflict
  • Emotional appeal

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Do exercise on creating a breakout premise, culminating in a 300-word opening paragraph.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do exercises from the workbook (pp. 200-207) to break down your existing premise, character, and motivation, along with a 3-paragraph memo examining the potential problems or obstacles in your approach and how these might be solved.

Session Two: Characters

  • All stories are character-driven
  • Greater or lesser than, but also equal
  • Creating a cast

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): The goal of this assignment is to consider how your character’s personality, motivations, and perspectives come through in voice. If the first assignment led to a premise and character that you want to continue with, go back to that exercise and look at the voice you’ve chosen to tell the story. How do the word choice and tone fit with the character and situation you’ve set up? Does the voice fit with and reveal character? Rewrite the scene if you need to, seeing how your narration reveals character, and then write an additional scene (of 1,000 words) where you try to hear the voice clearly and allow it to direct the course of the scene and your character (meaning, that the character, actions, thoughts, and voice all sync up clearly on the page).

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do exercises from the workbook (pp. 18, 24, 31-2, and 35) on defining character, motivation, personality, and voice in your work-in-progress. Then choose a scene—perhaps an early one, or your opening—to rewrite or revise, matching the voice and tone with your character and premise.

Session Three: Stakes

  • All stakes are personal stakes
  • Raising stakes without straining credulity
  • Avoiding so what

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write three early scenes (500 words each) where the stakes are revealed and/or raised for the character on his or her quest. Consider how all three illustrate both public and private stakes (or, internal and external conflict) and consider how or why your character will keep moving forward even as he or she experiences resistance or complication. (By the way, these need not be scenes of gigantic personal stakes; every bit of external conflict reveals something about the personal conflict of the character. Even a small moment can reveal important things about your character.)

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do exercises from the workbook on personal and ultimate stakes (pp. 48-9, 54-5, 86), then pick two scenes from your work in progress (around 1,500 words) to rework, identifying the internal and external motivations/conflicts of the protagonist in the scenes and raising the stakes.

Session Four: Plot

  • The five essential plot elements
  • The importance of conflict
  • Structure and high moments

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write a scene (around 1,250-1,500 words) that precedes or in some way builds up to one of your “high moment” scenes. (You may even arrive at a high moment by the end.) How does the character come into direct conflict, in both big and small ways, in achieving his goal? What are the personal stakes that resonate not just for the character but for the reader? Set up the conflict and arc of the particular scene and then allow your character to lead … and perhaps even surprise you.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do the exercises on adding tension (pp 152-3) and rewrite the scenes you’ve chosen from your work in progress to not only heighten the tension of the scenes for the character but for the reader … that the underlying stakes and conflicts are identifiable and in some way universal.

Session Five: Time and Place

  • World building
  • Selective show and tell
  • When and where to be wary

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Do exercise on building specific details of your primary setting, culminating in a brief 1,000-1,250-word scene introducing the place and building the world so not just physical setting emerges but the feel or mood you intend the place to evoke.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do the exercise from the workbook on “The Psychology of Place” and rework a scene from your work in progress (1,250-1,500 words) in which the primary setting is featured. Make sure we understand the place in terms of how the character sees it and feels about it … and rewrite the scene so that the setting strikes the tone you intend.

Session Six: Contemporary Plot Techniques

  • The character-driven story
  • The non-linearity of consciousness
  • Internal/external tension

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write a scene (around 1,000-1,250 words) in which the protagonist’s conflict is primarily internal … in other words, where he or she views something going on from a distance which his or her own internal motivations or perceptions, or where a simple exchange with another character alters or reaffirms his views, what-have-you. The purpose of the brief scene is not to focus on the external event but his or her internal view of it … to move us close to the character’s thinking or perception of some (even small) external event, thereby moving us into the character’s consciousness (no matter if you’re using 1st or 3rd person narration).

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do the workbook exercise on “Strengthening Point of View” (pp. 185-186) and then follow through with the scene you’ve randomly selected from your work in progress (no more than 1,500 words) for the exercise, heightening the sense of character, consciousness, and internal tension in the scene.

Session Seven: Multiple Viewpoints, Subplots, Pace, Voice, Endings

  • Relationship of plot and subplot
  • Voice
  • Pacing and playing God

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write a brief scene which does the following: 1) spans the course of many hours (say, half a day), 2) unfolds in several different locations, with several auxiliary characters, 3) introduces or suggests a possible sub-plot with one of the secondary characters, 4) has an overall and identifiable arc which is self-contained (having to do with a specific goal the protagonist has in the scene), and 5) does all of this in 1,000 words. The goal of the exercise is to consider how the author gets to “play God” with the voice: expanding on what needs expanding, compressing or doing away with what isn’t needed or would drag the scene down, etc. Consider especially how transitions (such as “hours later” or “that night” or “At the hotel … ”) might help you cover lots of time and place/space simply and economically.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Do the exercise “Brewing Tension” on pp. 139-140 and choose a scene from your work in progress (around 1,500 words) that you can revise in order to practice both building tension and using compression. (If you were writing the Fundamentals exercise, for example, three paragraphs about the protagonist driving from one location to another would be a good place to target.) Keep in mind that tension and compression both come from the same place: not from the action (or lack thereof) in a scene but from voice.

Session Eight: Theme

  • The difference between theme and “moral”
  • Theme as unifying structure
  • Discovering theme

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write the last 1,500-2,000 words of your novel, in whatever way you see the novel ending at this moment. (This might include the climax of your story but will likely be denouement, the winding up of story that comes after the climax.) Consider what aspects of story you have to tie up at the very end … but, more importantly, consider what the feel of the book’s ending should be, what mood you wish to strike at the end and what kind of moment you want to end on, considering your language and tone as you write. Look back at what you’ve written and consider how the closing words of the novel suggest the book’s theme … in other words, how the ending suggests the meaning of the book in such a way that the meaning is universal, something your reader can easily identify (and identify with).

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Revisit the memo and the workbook exercises (pp. 200-207) that you did in the first lesson and consider whether your existing ending in the work-in-progress really fulfills the thematic point or tone you want. Then, rewrite your last 2,000 words to strengthen the theme we see at the end … or to re-envision an alternate ending for the book that strikes at the heart of what you want the book to be about.