Story Mastermind is a five-month small group workshop intensive. The deliverable is a fully workshopped novel draft and submission materials. We’ll give you a taste of how we discuss story in Novel Mastermind: from the premise, the elevator pitch, the logline; to theme, character objective, and stakes.

Your novel has to be somewhere. It can be anywhere! But setting is not an arbitrary detail: it can make all the difference.

Publishing loves its buckets. In children's books, there are several buckets that you need to fit into, with word count guidelines and all of that. There are buckets and tropes in adult publishing as well. Books that don't lend themselves easily to categorization can be a really difficult sell.

We've all heard people who claim that somebody took their idea and is now publishing it, or that somewhere somehow, another writer has come up with basically the same idea, sold it, and now, what does that mean for your idea?

Writing invariably is a passion for a lot of people that I work with. And they just, for whatever reason, have not been able to sort of devote themselves to it until now. And that's usually when they come to me and I plug into their process.

This one's for all the people who are still casting around for an idea. How do you create a story? What matters to you, and what matters to readers?

Stories are like people. They have a body, and a soul. The body is the plot, the actions that happen. And the soul is the character, the protagonist, the key person (or persons) bound by the circumstances of the plot and forced into decisions.

Here's an energizing pep talk on how to write, including the ingredients you need to get started and keep going.

Writing a novel series? Here are some valuable tips on planning and executing your series, as well as how to pitch it to publishers.

What’s a writer to do? When you feel like you should write a “girl book” because it’s all you’ve written before? When girls are your audience, do you dare branch out and try to reach boy readers? What if that affects your sales? Your school visits? Your future?