In the second month of Think Sideways, we’re doing our Project Planning.

Week 5 – Define Your Project’s Needs

Holly teaches the Dot and Line technique in this week’s lesson. The Dot helps you to focus on the most interesting, extraordinary or significant details of your character, setting, conflict, etc. The Line marks off the differences between things.

How do you use them? Well, the Dot helps you focus on the details that are pertinent. For example, your heroine has long, blond hair. Who cares? Lots of people have long, blond hair. That’s an ordinary detail. The Dot helps you make that into an extraordinary detail. Not just long, blond hair, but hair that is twenty feet long (ala Rapunzel) and strong enough to support the weight of an adult. Now that’s an extraordinary detail about your heroine that deserves to get mentioned in your story. You focus on the Dot details to make your characters, settings, and conflicts unique and extraordinary.

The Line helps you figure out potential conflicts for your story. For example, Rapunzel is on one side of the line, the Witch is on the other. Rapunzel is young, beautiful and yearns to get out of the tower. The Witch is old, ugly and thinks Rapunzel should stay in the tower forever. Pitting them against each other via the Line, you have young vs. old, beautiful vs. ugly, and escape dreams vs. long-term imprisonment. Lots to argue about there and plenty of material for sarcastic or angry dialogue, or sneaky acts against each other. In other words, plenty of conflict between those two characters. You can apply the Line to characters, settings, motivations… almost any part of your story.

The Dot and Line technique were a real eye-opener for me in how to enrich my story with extraordinary details and conflicts that I might have overlooked before.

Week 6 – Discover Your Project’s Markets

In this week we learned three things:

1. How to identify the market that our project fits into.
3. How to change genres with a technqiue called Book Mapping.
4. How to create our own genre (if one doesn’t currently exist to fit our work).

This is an extremely useful lesson for writers planning a long career of writing. Genres don’t stay static. They grow, change, wither, sometimes die, and morph into other genres altogether. If you can’t flex with the changing markets, you’ll have a hard time staying successful in the publishing world.

Week 7 – Develop Your Project-Creation System

Holly gives an excellent example of how she spent way too much time world-building on her first few novels, only to find that nobody wanted to publish those stories set in her heavily-detailed, fascinating worlds. Over time she learned to build only enough world to get her story started and then add pertinent details along the way. This saved her a bunch of time by eliminating all the hours she spent building worlds, characters, and plot details for stories that were never used, i.e. published.

She walks you through the eight core planning modules that allow you to build just enough details to get your story started. Five of the modules are mandatory for every story – Character, Conflict, Time & Place, Scenes and Math. Three are optional, based on the type of story you’re writing – Maps & World, Culture, Language.

Week 8 – Plan Your Project

In this week, you’re almost ready to start writing. Holly walks you through creating an effective and efficient outline. No, not the scary roman-numeral outline that you learned in school. This is a fluid, easy-to-use outline that provides a high-level summary of each scene in your story. The techniques she teaches in this week are how to use Plot cards and The Sentence Lite. The combination of the two helps you create active scenes with conflict to keep your story moving.

Recap

I’m really enjoying this course. Holly is presenting many techniques that have proven to be super useful already in planning my story. I’m adding interesting nuances to my characters and plot that I doubt I could have come up with on my own. I’m very eager to see how the final story turns out when it is all done. Feels like it could be a breakout novel for me.

If you’re interested in signing up for How to Think Sideways, you can check it out here. And check back here in a month for the next report on Month 3.

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Week 1 – How to Break the Thinking Barriers to Your Success

In this lesson Holly addresses four areas of thinking that will hold you back from achieving the success you want as a writer. We all know that a lot of our success is built on our attitude. If you have a negative attitude and give up easily, you aren’t going to achieve much. Holly zeroes in on four specific thinking problems that writers face – Safe, Perfect, Victim, Feel. Perfect is my barrier. I think I need to make my stories perfect from the beginning. Even though I consciously know that, there is a small, nagging voice in the back of my head that says, “You could do this better. You should do this better. If you aren’t going to make it perfect, why are you writing?” And before you know it, I’ve stopped writing, or never really started on a project, because I’m defeated before I even begin.

Holly gives practical exercises for each of the four barriers to help you break through them. For Perfect, she advises using a ten-minute timer and practicing just writing–no corrections, no rethinking, just keep writing the entire ten minutes. Tell the Editor in your head to shut up and let your fingers fly.

Week 2 – How to Discover Your Writing “Sweet Spot”

I loved this lesson, but it was HARD. The basis for this lesson is on how you define yourself as a writer. If you define yourself as a writer of Westerns, what did you do when the Western genre dried up and rolled away like a tumbleweed? Same thing for the horror genre, unless your name was Stephen King. Holly advises that instead of defining yourself in terms of a specific genre, you uncover your “Sweet Spot” material. This is the material that resonates with you, that is unique to you as a person. It can be objects, themes, sounds, sights, tastes–anything.

Here’s an example. Holly provides six prompts to get you started. One is “I am drawn to”. On my Sweet Spot diagram, I have listed outer space, sparkly things, sad songs, sacrifice, tragedy, rain, and blank journals. If the science fiction genre dried up tomorrow, I could still write stories about outer space by using that element in a different way. Maybe my contemporary romance character is an astronomer, or maybe just a head-in-the-clouds stargazer. The themes or elements of sacrifice and tragedy can be found in any genre.

What Holly is doing here is giving you the key to being able to continue writing material that means something to you, no matter what the publishing world does. This week is priceless, in my opinion.

Week 3 – How to Generate Ideas on a Deadline

For this week, we got to practice listening to our Muse to get ideas. We “seed” our minds with our Sweet Spot material, not picking anything deliberately, but just reading over the diagrams to plant the items in our head. Then she recommends you walk away and do something else. Anything else that is NOT writing. Don’t deliberately try to come up with ideas for a story. Just let your Muse throw up ideas to you as it decides to.

It might seem a little hocus-pocus, new agey, but haven’t we all experienced that moment when you’re busy working on something and out of the blue you get an idea for a story? What Holly is trying to do here is to train your mind to be receptive to those ideas that your mind comes up with, instead of shutting them down immediately with a “That idea’s no good” or “I hate Westerns. Why would I want to write about a cowboy?” Negative thoughts shut down the Muse, so Holly shows you how to work with your Muse to keep the ideas coming.

Week 4 – How to Recognize and Build on Good Ideas

In this lesson we learned about the Sentence. I’m sure you’ve heard other writers talk about how you need to be able to state your story idea or premise in one sentence–the 10-second elevator pitch, if you will. Holly shows you how to construct a sentence first, before you start creating background and doing worldbuilding for your story. If you don’t have the Sentence, all the worldbuilding you do is for nothing. Holly learned this by personal experience with her Korre series (Talyn and Hawkspar).

If you want to be able to “sell” your novel to an agent or an editor, you need to be able to capture the essence of the story in the Sentence, so they “get it”. If you can’t, good luck selling your story, no matter how finely detailed and crafted it might be.

Holly is teaching from the standpoint of starting a brand-new novel, but all of the material is applicable to a current work-in-progress. I find this especially helpful as I’m currently rethinking the science fiction novel I’m working on. I’m a bit lost in a muddle and I think it is because I don’t have the Sentence worked out for it. Give me another month of lessons and I’ll be well on my way.

If you’re interested in signing up for How to Think Sideways, you can check it out here. And check back in a month for the next report on Month 2.

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1. Review of How to Think Sideways – Month 2

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