Description

The 90-Day Novel is a Live-on-Zoom workshop with Alan Watt that will take you from initial idea to the completion of your novel's first draft in 90 days.

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The 90-Day Novel is about making a contract with your subconscious. Your subconscious is the seat of your genius, and there is a window of time that it can remain fully engaged in a creative task before it gets distracted, fatigued, or your ego begins to challenge it.

Genius is not a noun - it's a verb. The 90-Day Novel helps you tap into that primal well to which we all have access, by marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of structure.

The 90-Day Novel is not about writing a polished first half of a novel or memoir, but rather, developing a coherent narrative, grounded in character, that leads to a transformation. When you connect to the heart of your story and hold your idea of the plot loosely…magic starts to happen.

The 90-Day Novel is a simple but powerful process that keeps you in your right brain, so that your subconscious can do the "heavy lifting" of developing a compelling narrative. Your left brain is good at doing one thing - solving problems - and while this is helpful in your everyday life, it's not as helpful in building a story...

...because the purpose of story is to reveal a transformation. When we get stuck, we tend to ask ourselves questions, like "Why is this so difficult for me?" And our brain provides us with answers; our childhood was uneventful...we weren't properly schooled, etc. But creating art is not an assembling of facts, it is a search for the truth. Therefore, our challenge as writers mirrors that of our protagonist, namely surrendering a limiting belief of ourself or the world in order to be freed from it.

About the Workshop

The workshop is a combination of craft lessons and stream-of-consciousness writing exercises where writers read their work and I work with a number of writers one-on-one to illustrate the principles.

Each Zoom workshop is recorded. You will receive a link to rewatch the workshop as often as you wish for up to three weeks.

Every morning a daily letter from The 90-Day Novel, lands in your inbox.

The letters were developed over the course of several years, and are a guide through the process of creating a compelling narrative.

Writers often comment on the synchronicity of the letters - on how they seem to meet you right where you are. While the letters focus on craft, they are also a response to the seemingly uncanny uniformity of experience shared by the many writers who have taken the 90-day journey before you.

The 90-Day Novelists are a tribe, and the group forum is where we meet each day to share our daily experiences and hold ourselves accountable to our daily page count.

Over the course of 90 days we discover that we're not alone - the ups and downs that caused us to question whether or not we were really a writer, are, in fact, par for the course.

It's liberating to realize that our private struggles are universal, and that they often provide direct clues into the world of our characters.

During the first month of the workshop, in the outlining phase, I offer one-on-one story consultations where you can send me your three-page outline and I review it, make notes, and go over it with you in a one-hour consult to explore the most dynamic and compelling way to tell your story before you begin your first draft. There is an additional cost, and a limited number of spots for this service.