Holly Lisle – How to Think Sideways and other courses

After months and months of raving about Holly Lisle courses here on the blog just because I think they’re amazing, I decided to join her affiliate to promote them to my friends and followers. So on this page, you can find links to Holly Lisle’s courses tagged with my Holly Lisle affiliate ID: if you follow the links and buy anything from Holly’s site, then I can buy some new courses and tell you what’s awesome about them, and so on. Everybody wins. 😉

How to Revise Your Novel was the first course I took from Holly, and it’s got great stuff for anybody who struggles with any aspect of revision. Holly breaks down everything you need to do to take a hot mess first draft and turn it into a really great book. There’s a lot of lessons about how to take stock of what you’ve already written, what it’s doing well at so far, what needs to be improved or added, what may need to be cut. Then you go into the Monastery, come out with an outline of what you want the book to look like, and spend another few lessons tweaking that before you start rewriting and polishing. I would recommend this to nearly any writer.

HTRYN also includes the 7-Day Crash Revision Workshop, which you can buy seperately. That one is all about triage revision on a deadline, usually when you have notes from an editor and can land an awesome opportunity by getting the changes made at a superhuman turnaround time. I haven’t had the opportunity to put this to the test yet, but I think it’s an awesome skill to have in your writing toolbox, and if this is what you need right now, then go get it right away!

How To Think Sideways Ultra is Holly’s flagship course. I’m a little less than halfway through this, and it’s great stuff for anybody who wants to be a writer and:

•  is having a hard time getting past good intentions to the actual writing part.
• struggles with blank page syndrome (having a hard time committing to starting a new piece of writing,) or perfectionism (especially stopping fiddling with a story when it’s finished.)
• has a hard time coming up with ideas of what to write about, picking one idea or keeping track of story ideas.
• wants to learn more about how to pitch story ideas and sell them before they’re written.

My favorite parts of the “How to Think Sideways course so far include the Sweet Spot Map, which taught me a lot about what matters to me as a writer and what I want to write about, and the Calling Down Lightning brainstorming technique, where I learned to open the lines of communication to my inspiration and how to listen when it was talking to me.

I haven’t taken any of Holly’s clinics yet, but they seem really cool, in-depth lessons that are short enough that you can tackle them all at once, but broken up so that you can go through them in sections if you want. You can buy all five clinics in a bundle for a discount price, or pick them up separately:

1. Create a Character Clinic
2. Create a Culture Clinic
3. Create a Language Clinic
4. Create a Plot Clinic
5. Create A World Clinic

I also have my eye on: How to Write a Series, How to Write Page-Turning Scenes, and How to Write Dialogue with Subtext.

You can browse through Holly’s writer’s shop for yourself and see what you’re interested in. Maybe you need:

• The “How to Motivate Yourself” Workshop
• How to Beat Writer’s Block
• How to Find Your Writing Discipline
• 21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing When Your Life Has Just Exploded
• 3-Minute fix for the WORST mistake writers make (Video plays on this page.)

Thanks for reading! We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog, already in progress.