Foreword
David Farland has trained dozens of New York Times bestselling authors over the years—people like Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), Brandon Sanderson (Wheel of Time), and Brandon Mull (Fablehaven) all came to him before they had ever sold a novel, then went on to make millions.
As a greenlighting analyst, David Farland worked helping with novels and films (as a consultant he urged Scholastic to push Harry Potter big, long before they were willing to do so).
And as a videogame designer he helped create stellar games like Starcraft: Brood War.
Eventually, people began asking him to teach a class on how to integrate high-level audience analysis into the design of a new intellectual property—a book or movie—and his popular writing course “Million-Dollar Outlines” was born.
This book is used during the course as a reference, a refresher for many of the main ideas. An earlier edition was hastily thrown together. This new edition is heavily rewritten, and hopefully will help you learn not just how to outline, but how to begin tweaking your work in major intellectual properties before you ever begin writing.
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