Are you ready to take the leap?

Have you had enough of wondering whether your story works—and if not, why not?

Enough of the dead-end and blind-alley blues? Of worrying whether the hours, days, weeks, months, and years you've poured into writing it will all be for naught, leaving you with a pile of story debris that you still believe in but have no idea how to salvage?

Would you like a way out? An aha! moment or two... or twenty? An oh-my-god-I-see-it-now epiphany?

You've come to the right place.

Description

DSYS 101 is a six-week, intensive online course designed to give you a set of powerful writing tools that you can apply right away to your current work and master as you use them repeatedly in your lifelong journey as a writer.

By studying a work you admire and exploring your own work-in-progress with guided assistance, you will learn how to focus on the one aspect of your story that determines everything else, nip story problems in the bud (and prevent them from appearing in the first place), develop your story to its fullest potential, and discover what it wants to say and how to say it with dramatic grace.

Through group sessions, one-on-one coaching, and self-paced lessons, you will learn what makes your favorite stories work and how to elevate your own work-in-progress to their ranks.

Required Materials

This course requires only two essential materials (well, three, if you count an internet-connected computer or mobile device):

• Discovering the Soul of Your Story, which you can purchase online in softcover or Amazon Kindle format
• A personal work-in-progress of your choosing

The book contains the required reading assignments, and your work-in-progress will serve as the focus of your story development efforts in the course.

Structure

The DSYS 101 course is built around three interactive elements:

• Three group sessions with your course mates
• Four one-on-one coaching sessions with the instructor
• Five self-paced lessons (divided into two distinct modules)

The group sessions (via Zoom) will provide you the opportunity to interact with the instructor and your fellow students as you work to understand and apply the principles of Discovering the Soul of Your Story. They include the Course Kickoff, Midterm Check-in, and Graduation.

The one-on-one sessions with the instructor (also via Zoom) include a pre-game welcome chat, private office-hours sessions in both modules, and a post-course personal review.

The self-paced lessons guide you through the process of learning how to understand and apply the principles of Discovering the Soul of Your Story. Each one includes a reading assignment (from the book), a video presentation, and a set of exercises designed to give you hands-on experience using the principles to develop your own work.

Helpful Resources

To help guide you to a thorough understanding of the Discovering the Soul of Your Story principles and their applications to your own work and writing life, the instructor will be available via email to answer questions throughout the course.

You will also be given access to (and encouraged to make use of) a site-based forum exclusive to DSYS 101 students, where you can pose questions, get answers, and even contribute your own insights to help others. And your access to the DSYS 101 lessons and forum will continue even after you have completed the course.

And, of course, you will be able to employ the many articles in the Library to develop and enhance your understanding.

Bottom Line

When you're ready to take your story-making skills to the next level and experience leaps-and-bounds progress on your current work-in-progress, simply click the enrollment link on this page. And if you have a question or two before you take that plunge, feel free to get in touch.