Seductive Beginnings with Suzy Vitello

In this 6-week intensive class, Suzy Vitello will identify your writing strengths and help you capitalize on them. 100% Online, Available Everywhere!

Your Instructor: Suzy Vitello

Where: Online — Available everywhere!

When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here

Enrollment: 15 Students Maximum

Price: $397

Class Description

To lead this powerful six-week intensive class, Portland's "best kept secret" of the writing stars, Suzy Vitello, will give you a diagnostic assignment, followed by a "readout" that analyzes your writing strengths in terms of six major areas: The Hook, Plot Promise, Structure, Character Voice & Introduction, POV/tense choices, and Language/ Mechanics. Each student writer will gain a concrete understanding of what he or she does best (their "differentiator"), and will receive specific directions on what to do to capitalize on those strengths in service to hooking an agent or publisher.

What This Class Covers

Week 1: Find your sweet spot (a personalized approach)
Week 2: End your first paragraph with a bullet to the head
Week 3: Get rid of the scaffolding
Week 4: Show don’t tell strategies you’ve never heard
Week 5: What your opening 3 chapters must accomplish
Week 6: How to get an agent to request a “full”

Goals Of This Class

  • Understand and leverage your strengths as a writer: find your sweet spot and exploit it
  • Find the right opening for your book -- one that bursts with energy and promise
  • Understand the power in cutting the typical “throat clearing” out of your opening, and get moving from the first sentence
  • Produce three chapters (or up to 45 pages) that will get you a request for a full manuscript

How Classes Are Structured

Our classes are hosted 100% online. We offer a clean and simple structure to our online classroom through the following features:

  • Class Dashboard: The hub. This is where messages and major updates for the students are posted. (see a screenshot)
  • Lectures: This is where instructors post their lectures. Read the current lecture and return to re-read it as much as you like. A link for previous lectures will take you back to them even after new instructional material gets posted.
  • Assignments: Assignments get posted in conjunction with similiarily themed lectures, but live under their own tab where they're easy to find. Each has a deadline, but students can login to work on them in a flexible way that accommodates any schedule.
  • Homework: Students can see all the assignments thus far submitted on the Homework page. It's just another name for Assignments, but gives you one convenient place to find them all after they're turned in. This helps students help each other through cycles of peer critique.
  • Discussions: A forum for students to discuss the class. Also a place where instructors can engage with students in less formal topics.
  • Class Members: A great place to see a roster of all the students currently enrolled in the class.

Take a tour of our online classroom to see how it all looks and feels.  We trust you won't scratch anything.

How our classes work Class FAQs