Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Editing and Rewriting
Lesson time 13:59 min
Dan shares his practical system for tracking the status of an edit and demonstrates how to strengthen your project through revision.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Know When It's Not Working • Write a Lot, Edit More • Edit From the Perspective of Your Reader • Create a System for Tracking the Status of Your Edit • Payoffs: Try Doing a 180 • Get Feedback at the Right Time, From the Right People • Know When You're Done • Commit to Your Ideas
Teaches Writing Thrillers
In his first-ever online class, best-selling author Dan Brown teaches you his step-by-step process for turning ideas into page-turning novels.
Get Up To 50% OffPreview
I want to tell you about one of the most painful experiences I had as a writer. I had just spent about a year and a half on the opening 150 pages of "The Lost Symbol," and I was going to California and I printed the manuscript and-- and took it with me and I went down to Venice Beach. I rented a beach chair, I sat down, and I read this 150 pages. And I realized, they're not good. They don't accomplish what I need them to accomplish to be a successful thriller. I was devastated because it was so much work, and I went home and I threw the pages out. But I was committed to the idea of the novel for "The Lost Symbol". I had my world, I had my moral gray area, I knew what I wanted to write about. But I was also certain that I hadn't got there yet. So you as a novelist need to find that commitment to your idea, but temper it with an understanding that you're not going to get it right the first time. There's a difference between being committed to your idea and being a lazy editor. You'll often hear writers say that the difference between good writers and bad writers is that good writers know when they're bad, and that means a couple of things. It means that all writers are bad sometimes-- you're not going to get it right the first time. I certainly don't. It also means that the most important skill you're going to have as a writer is to know when you're bad. To be able to say, oh, that was an interesting idea, didn't quite work. Delete it. And having that critical instinct to know that it's not right and delete it without beating yourself up over it because guess what, that's part of the process. Editing is part of the process of writing. Saying, you know what, I just wrote 10 pages and three of them are great. The other seven go in the garbage. When you buy a novel, you're not paying for all of the words that the author put on the page. You're paying for all of the words the author deleted. The author did the heavy lifting of deciding what's important. The author gave what works room to breathe, and that means that your reading experience is pleasant. You're not hitting things that you don't need or you don't want to read. If you're setting out to write a thriller, that moves, that inspires, that gets people turning pages, you're going to need a lean and tight narrative. Now writing a lean, tight narrative doesn't necessarily mean that you're writing less, it means that you're editing more. You're going to have to create a lot of language, a lot of plot, and a lot of dialogue that actually doesn't make your final draft. Because by distilling a lot of information into those little gems, you will create a story that is nothing but the best of what you wrote. I live in New Hampshire-- we make maple syrup the same way. We pour gallons and gallons and gallons of this sort of diluted syrup into a vat, and we boil it, and we boil it, we boil it. And everything that isn't maple sugar candy evaporates and what you're left with is...
About the Instructor
Packed with secret symbols and high-stakes suspense, Dan Brown’s thrillers have sold more than 250 million copies and include one of the world’s best-selling novels, The Da Vinci Code. In his writing class, Dan unveils his step-by-step process for turning ideas into gripping narratives. Learn his methods for researching like a pro, crafting characters, and sustaining suspense all the way to a dramatic surprise ending.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Dan Brown
In his first-ever online class, best-selling author Dan Brown teaches you his step-by-step process for turning ideas into page-turning novels.
Explore the Class