Course Description for

Novel Notions for the Novelist

with Delphine Boswell

Registration Fee and Course Length

Prerequisites

Standard course: $180 / 6 weeks. Click here to register.

Extended schedule: $224 / 12 weeks. Click here to register.
Extended course is designed for busy people and gives you two weeks to do each lesson but contains NO additional material.

No prerequisites.

Course Contacts

Course Description

Novel Notions for the Novelist is a class that guarantees to enrich your writing efforts by means of creative visual, verbal, and hands-on activities. The lessons in the course provide helpful suggestions and practical advice to any writer who has faced the proverbial question, "Where do I go from here?" Whether your characters run into a brick wall, or you just run out of ideas, Novel Notions for the Novelist will get your creative juices running again.

Course Objective: Novel Notions for the Novelist is intended to:

• Jump start ideas
  
• Enhance existing ideas
  
• Better acquaint you with your characters
  
• Familiarize you with your setting
  
• Strengthen your plot and determine your conflict
  
• Aid in connecting ideas to enable you to "see" your subplots and moments of tension
  
• Prevent stereotyping of characters
  
• Help you arrange scenes
  
• Provide creative solutions for problems
• Offer ways to promote the work you write

Week One: Find innumerable ways to jump-start your ideas and enhance your existing ones by means of fun and helpful activities, such as: mind mapping, free writing, outlining, journaling, and more.

Week Two: Learn how to set up file folders for each of your characters, complete with interview sheets and photos. Additionally, put together your own photo album of the setting and key events. Find out how to develop newspaper-type headlines for each scene.

Week Three: Design a visual rhetoric that allows you to see up front the plot of your novel and the conflict. Connect key ideas by means of a collage, and see your subplots clearly as well as the tension. Make a deck of each character's traits and professions to mix-and-match, thereby, preventing stereotyping. Keep track of scenes and find ways to change and rearrange them.

Week Four: Writing can be an isolating, lonely profession; this lesson will show you ways to involve others who might just be able to help.

Week Five: Where do you go from here? This lesson suggests practical tips for those times when you're plain stuck.

Week Six: Every novelist hopes to see his or her book in print one day. What are some ways to promote the book you've just written?

PLANNED HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENTS BY WEEK:
Week One: Look for and clip newspaper/magazine columns that offer intriguing ideas. Scour the web for similar ideas to print and save. Get out the old photos and journal what thoughts they inspire. Pick one or two of these ideas and: mind map them, free write on them, outline them, and journal about them.

Week Two: Choose your protagonist, antagonist, and secondary characters and interview them (questions provided in lesson). Look through magazines for pictures of them; glue to front of each character's file folder. Now, do the same for the setting of your novel and for the key events. Come up with a catchy, clever headline for at least one of your acts.

Week Three: Create your own visual rhetoric of the plot and conflict. Using pictures, create a collage of your subplots and moments of tension. Make your own deck of playing cards with your character's traits and profession. Begin to assemble a key chain of scenes.

Week Four: Make a list of people you might email with questions about your novel. Search out people to be readers for your work. Pick one person you plan to interview to gain research for your novel.

Week Five: Ask a friend to make you a "brown bag of tags." Play around with switching scenes on your key ring. Try changing traits and professions for your characters. Journal a list of "what-if'questions.

Week Six: Assume your novel is complete and finally revised. Develop a platform for your novel. Write up a list of items that might be found in a gift basket waffle. Design a bookmark of your novel. Write up a press release.

Allow at least two to three hours per lesson.

I have taught at the secondary, community college, and university levels, so I know how students appreciate feedback and in a timely manner on their work. Because this course involves creating written as well as visual projects, the lessons are geared more to the individual and how creative one wants to get. There is no "right-or-wrong" way for students to responding to the homework assignments.

Delphine Boswell, M.A., has several nonfiction published credits in the area of parent/teacher education as well as some some children books. She holds an MA in Early Childhood Education with her emphasis in parenting. She has taught writing, speech, and literature at the community college and university levels.

She also holds an MA in English, major emphasis Composition and Rhetoric. Her love is fiction, and she has completed five novels in the genres of mystery, suspense, and psychological horror. She is presently enrolled in a Master's of Fine Arts program with the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts with her area of interest being Creative Writing. For her thesis, she is presently working on a science-fiction novel about a future dystopia that is controlled by an oppressive government.

Recently, one of her science fiction short stories "The Neighbors" was published in the Soundings Review, a literary journal. Delphine is married and the mother of four young adult children. In between writing and teaching, her three "fur children" keep her more than busy. She describes her passion for writing with John Steinbeck's words, "I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe."