Write a Novel in Forty Weeks! Or Not.

Pam and I are nailing down the McDaniel curriculum–well, Pam’s had her part done for weeks–and as I look out over the five eight-week courses, I am reminded of how irate I get every time I see one of those Write A Novel in a Weekend! books. Or even Write A Novel in a Month! books. Hell, I can’t TYPE a novel in a month. But forty weeks is, um . . . divide forty by four weeks in a month … TEN MONTHS and yes you can write a novel in ten months. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.

So again, looking at five courses and trying to decide how to balance what needs to be done (everything) with what students will legitimately have the time to do (about a tenth of everything) while covering all the bases (more than four) while not being superficial (and that was Point of View you just saw zipping past your window on the Romance Writing Bus) and still leaving students with a viable project to market at the end of the fifth class, my head hits the desk. Plus I believe that creative writing teachers should have “Primum non nocere” tattooed on their foreheads or at least on their lesson plans, because “First, do no harm” would have prevented a lot of the bitterness I see in people with MFAs.

So in the spirit of “Primum,” I don’t tell people how to write; they get to choose that path on their own. Then second, I don’t tell people what to write; their Girls in the Basement will choose that path for them. What’s left? Pretty much “how to write better while sticking to the way you want to write and the stories you want to tell.” Which is the place where I started from in planning the last four courses.

The first course is a romance genre survey which means talking about romance as a writer and reader. There are many good things about this, but a key benefit is that it gives students the first eight weeks of the forty to write their novels. Reading story (or watching story) is a fertile source of inspiration, and talking about writing often spurs people to actually put words on a page. But for me, as the teacher batting clean-up in the next four courses, it’s a chance to say, “Write as much of your novel as you can before you hit 522 because after that, we’re going to be playing in that sucker and I want you to have your story established before I start poking at it.

Given that, then we can talk about character and community and love and sex in 522 with side excursions into scene structure and critique methods, and then segue into plotting and novel structure in 523 with side excursions into synopsis writing, and then do heavy-duty workshopping of the first thirty to fifty pages of the novel in 524, and then finish up by putting a proposal together and researching publishing in 550. If the student keeps writing in the background through all of that, it’s entirely possible to have a complete ms in forty weeks. The laundry won’t get done, but the book might.

My task these past couple of weeks as I gathered all my notes and tables and lists together was to isolate assignments that would push the book forward without taking too much writing time away from it. Obviously one way to do that is to assign scenes from the book, and there are a couple of those, but I think it’s probably more helpful to require students to think about what they’re doing in the book as a whole. So while students in 522 will have to turn in the first scene in their books and then revise it after it’s critiqued, they’ll also have analytical exercises where they look at both the romantic and sexual arcs in their stories. And of course a conflict box because I don’t teach without a conflict box. So it’s a mix of actual scenes from the book, exercises about crucial content in the book, and critiques of other students work that help crystalize story theory for use later in their own work. In eight weeks. Right now, 522 has five assignments: A multi part story core analysis, the first scene in the book, critiques of four other students in the class, a multi part story emotion analysis, and a rewrite of that first scene. I think that’s do-able without making anybody insane while covering the tougher parts of character in the romance novel. I think.

I have to go put 523 together now from my notes, so I’ll probably disappear again for awhile, but I’d really like to know if this sounds like it’s both enough for a good education and not so much that the student weeps helplessly because she’s so far behind. And I’d also like to know what you’d want from a creative writing course that focused on the romance novel. I know this plan will change once we’ve taught the first five classes–education like war makes plans that stop when the battle begins–but I want to get it as right as possible the first time.