Non-Fiction Books

Could all your characters fit right in at your local mall? Even if you've set them in 10th century Italy or modern-day Russia...or on another planet? Need some help giving your characters the diverse backgrounds REAL people have? Pro novelist Holly Lisle walks you through her quick, fun, and practical system for developing cultures that feel real. You'll learn to create religions, philosophies, governments and lifestyles different than your own to add compelling conflict and an "I want to go there" feel to your stories. Holly Lisle's Create A Culture Clinic is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre, and for every experience level---from absolute beginner with no idea how cultures work, to published pro wanting to add depth and beauty to a book. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Holly Lisle fell in love with the mystery and complexity of cultures as a kid traipsing around the world in the wake of religion-swapping parents--she discovered barter and open-air markets, Mayan temples and Spanish haciendas, moose steaks, kayaks, life that didn't include electricity or plumbing, and the grim reality of food that arrived once a year by barge. Deeply grateful for advanced civilization, she has nonetheless sold more than 30 novels to major publishers in the US and around the world, many of these novels set in cultures from other times, other worlds, or other dimensions where plumbing is merely wishful thinking, electricity is what you avoid during storms, and open-air markets are a full of flies and thieves as the versions that so fascinated her when she was young. She is active online, teaching what she has discovered about writing fiction via courses, her writing diary, and her website, HollyLisle.com.

Are your character names lame? Do your characters all speak like you---or worse, in horrible, unreadable accents? Do you need to develop conflict among characters or people who don't speak the same language? Pro novelist Holly Lisle walks you through the easy, fun language-creation system she developed and uses in many of her 30+ novels. Create names that fit your story in 15 minutes, develop just as much language as you need, uncover story conflicts you can uncover in no other way, and much more. Holly Lisle's Create A Language Clinic is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre and every experience level---from absolute beginner needing better character and place names, to published pro looking for a faster, easier way add depth through language. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Holly Lisle crashed into languages head-on when she moved to Alaska at age nine---where she and the local Eskimo and Indian dialects never quite clicked. Her sole remembered sliver of Inuit allows her to ask for a cup of coffee. Sadly, she does not drink coffee. Stints in Costa Rica and Guatemala as a slightly older kid---where she got along much better with Spanish---and years of inventing her own languages, codes, and ciphers eventually led her to write novels set in other universes, other times, and other dimensions...which makes a sort of offbeat sense if you really work hard to see it. Holly Lisle has published more than thirty novels with major publishers in the US and around the world, (including HAWKSPAR and TALYN), is translated in a score of languages she CAN'T read, and is also well-known online for her writing classes, for one of the world's most opinionated online writing diaries

PENDING AN AMAZON-UPGRADABLE UPDATE WITH EASIER ACCESS TO ALL WORKSHEETS, CLASSROOM, and FORUM, THIS CLASS WILL NOW BE PRICED AT $3.99 PERMANENTLY. Struggling to put together a compelling, coherent plot? Have a stack of stalled 30-page novel starts? Have a finished manuscript and the sinking feeling something's wrong? Pro novelist Holly Lisle walks you through the simple, fun, effective techniques she's used to plot her 30+ published novels (and counting). Learn to plot without fear of error, to enjoy a process that keeps your story fresh, to adapt your plot to brilliant middle-of-the-book inspiration WITHOUT derailing your writing process, and much more. Holly Lisle's Create A Plot Clinic is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre, and for every experience level---from absolute beginner with no idea how to get started, to published pro looking for an easier way to beat a tight deadline. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Holly Lisle is a full-time novelist with more than 30 published novels in genres from fantasy and SF to paranormal suspense and YA, including HAWKSPAR and TALYN, and the recent Scholastic releases THE RUBY KEY and THE SILVER DOOR. She's also well-known online for her practical, immediately applicable writing courses, her opinionated online writing diary, and HollyLisle.com, her extensive writer-friendly website.

PENDING AN AMAZON-UPGRADABLE UPDATE WITH EASIER ACCESS TO ALL WORKSHEETS, CLASSROOM, and FORUM, THIS CLASS WILL NOW BE PRICED AT $3.99 PERMANENTLY. Have your characters gone on strike? Do you find yourself explaining your story instead of telling it? Do your scenes race by so quickly you put only the barest hint of what you want on the page? Not sure what a scene really is? Pro novelist Holly Lisle teaches the simple, fun, effective techniques she's used to plot her 30+ published novels (and counting). Learn the five types of conflict that keep readers hooked, the two elements EVERY scene must have, know when scenes are going to be good (or bad) BEFORE you write them, discover how to misdirect most of your readers most of the time, and much more. Holly Lisle's How To Write Page-Turning Scenes is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre, and for every experience level---from absolute beginner needing basics, to the published pro looking to notch up suspense and bring in new readers while thrilling existing ones. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Holly Lisle is a full-time novelist with more than 30 published novels in genres from fantasy and SF to paranormal suspense and YA, including Hawkspar and Talyn , and the Scholastic releases THE RUBY KEY and THE SILVER DOOR. She's also well-known online for her practical, immediately applicable writing courses, her opinionated online writing diary, and HollyLisle.com, her extensive writer-friendly website.

Want to Get PAID for Writing What You LOVE? In this collection of thirty-one essays, workshops, quizzes, Q&As, and how-to-do-it articles, novelist Holly Lisle — who went pro with her award-winning first novel, Fire in the Mist, in 1992 and who’s been writing full-time ever since (more than thirty novels published by major publishers, and still writing) offers help, comfort, and wry practical advice to the beginning fiction writer looking for answers. In the second edition of this book, Holly walks writers through Preparation, Practice, Writing & Selling, and Frequently Asked Questions, offering end-of-chapter exercises, workshops, and free downloadable worksheets designed to get the individual writer or members of writers’ groups working productively with publication as the goal. In this newly updated writing course, you will discover: Why you want to write... What you want to write... Who you want to write for... How to write only what you love and what matters to YOU... How to make your work good... And how to get paid for doing it. Writing is a learnable skill, not a magical process only those touched by the Book Fairy, or the Muse, can ever reach. If you want to write fiction, you can.

No one is BORN a writer (just as no one is BORN a lawyer). We all have to learn the SAME skills. But no matter where you’re starting… Even if you have NO story ideas, NO characters, and NO experience, you can finish a complete working plot outline in just SEVEN tiny lessons. If you have ever labored to come up with a GOOD way to start a story…If you have ever stumbled, lost and frustrated, through the MIDDLE of your book…If you have ever wondered,”How do I find an idea worth writing?“… Stop Struggling. Help Is Here. Start with Section One, where I’ll give you each step to creating a quick, professional plot outline. I’ll do a demonstration, and then, because writers write---they don’t just read about writing---you’ll do the exercise in which you’ll take what I’ve demonstrated and use it to start building your working plot outline. Step by step, you will: * Figure out your character. You’ll decide on the few points about him or her that really matter—but enough to give you a place to start your story, and not so much that you get bogged down in background and never get to your writing. * Decide on your central idea. You’ll figure out what actually counts in your story, so you avoid getting bogged down writing details that don’t. * Write your opener. You’ll learn how to give yourself and your readers a GREAT first look at your character doing something fascinating. * Create your ending. You’ll discover one method of planning out a great conclusion. * And rough in your middle… You know…all those pages that used to bog you down when you couldn’t figure out what happened next? Not anymore. But That’s Just Section One. My Professional Plot Outline Mini-Course also includes seven sequential plot-and-conflict lessons—to make sure you create a story that is tight, fascinating, compelling… …And as fun for you to write as it will be for your readers to read. Lesson One: What Is NOT A Plot Discover a secret about plots that even most professionals don’t know—a secret that has led way too many writers, including countless full-time novelists, in circles trying to figure out why their story is going wrong. Lesson Two: Mix ‘N’ Match Conflict Even if you have no idea what you want to write about, you can build a solid foundation for a good story in just minutes. Lesson Three: Questions And Answers Once you have conflict under control, you’ll find out one technique for giving your story and characters depth, and makig your story unbelievably richer and more interesting. Lesson Four: Candy Bar Scenes You’ll discover and apply one critical technique for keeping your story flowing and keeping your interest high from beginning, through treacherous story middle, to gripping ending. Lesson Five: Ordering Scenes For Conflict Learn how to experiment with structure to discover how you can best present your story to your reader. Lesson Six: Filling In The Blanks Now you’ll hunt down empty spaces between your candy bar scenes, and fill them with story that MATTERS—not with pointless wandering, characters who sit around thinking, or dialogues that go nowhere. Lesson Seven: Plotting As You Go Stories change as you write them. In your final week of class, you’ll learn how to adapt your plot outline to bend with the changes—without breaking your story. I KNOW you can create something amazing, even if you never have before. Why? Because more than ten thousand students just like you have already taken this course. And I hear back from a LOT of them, letting me know they've finished a story, or they've sold their work, or they've published it themselves. You CAN do this. Cheerfully, Holly Lisle

PENDING AN AMAZON-UPGRADABLE UPDATE WITH EASIER ACCESS TO ALL WORKSHEETS, CLASSROOM, and FORUM, THIS CLASS WILL NOW BE PRICED AT $3.99 PERMANENTLY. Every Fiction Writer Builds Worlds… You know you want to hook your readers on your fiction. You desperately want to build a growing audience of fans who love your characters, your stories, and the world in which you set them. But chances are—unless you're a science fiction or fantasy writer—you're certain that you don't need to do any worldbuilding, because you equate building worlds with sticking a big fantasy map in the front of your book, and writing about aliens, or dwarves and elves and dragons. The truth is, worldbuilding is the process of creating immersive fiction, of making it possible for your reader to experience the suspension of disbelief that allows him to live in your world. Every fiction writer already worldbuilds. Most writers simply do it badly. Because most writers don't think they build worlds in their fiction, the worlds they build by accident: • break their plots • kill their pacing • destroy their conflict • and eliminate their characters' motivation. By learning easy, fast techniques for creating immersive story worlds, you can be the writer whose work wins the readers you want. How easy? How fast? You can build your first world in about five minutes, and I've laid out this course so you can do this just by reading and doing the short workshop in the first chapter. You'll need a single piece of paper and a pen. Open the sample from the course, and begin proving to yourself that you can worldbuild—and that constructing quick, simple, and intentional worlds will make your stories better than you ever dreamed they could be. This course includes: • The 301-page, 70,000-word course… • Divided into SANE techniques—simple worldbuilding to develop immersive plots, conflicts, and characters • And GEEK-DEEP techniques used to write fiction when the world is a character, you want to keep all your readers while switching genres, or if you are writing series fiction… PLUS… • Comprehensive, easy-to use worksheets that allow you to organize your worlds for consistency between books, and so that you can pick up an old series and begin writing in it again • 11 Geek-Deep videos with additional Geek-Deep worksheets • 8 worldbuilding maps used by the author to create several published series (Korre, Matrin, Known Space), including five flat maps and three 3-D maps • Lifetime downloads of in-version course upgrades in PDF, .mobi (Kindle), and .epub formats. • And links in the back of the book to let you get all the extras at no additional cost. When you use Holly Lisle's Create A World Clinic... • You’ll get better stories. • Better characters. • Better plots. • Better description. • Better conflict. • And MUCH better consistency from story to story and book to book. Use the Amazon LOOK INSIDE feature to build your first world in about five minutes...BEFORE you buy. And then discover all the wonderful things you can do with your new world, and the many you'll create next.