Frequently Asked Questions

If David Farland’s Team sees that you’ve purchased the same course twice, we’ll refund one of them. If you don’t get the refund, feel free to contact us about it.

No.

David Farland worked at Brigham Young University helping professors from different countries get their works published, so he’s had a lot of experience with nonnative speakers. He’ll help you get your prose up to standard.

David Farland can teach most people to how to write publishable fiction, as long as they have the motivation and work ethic for it.

The Story Puzzle and Rewriting to Greatness will specifically help you with plotting. David Farland’s book Million Dollar Outlines is required reading and will also help you take your story to the next level.

While David Farland’s courses focus primarily on novel writing, David and his team worked on several screenplays and worked as a greenlight analyst in Hollywood, so his team can provide professional feedback. The courses can be tailored for screenplays.

These workshops were made specifically for novel writing, but they can be tailored for short stories. David Farland started his career by writing prize-winning short stories. Then was the lead judge for the largest worldwide speculative fiction short story contest, Writers of the Future, so he is more than able to help you out with short stories.

Some authors feel that the best way to improve as a writer is to start with a fresh story instead of trying to fix old stories. Many writers, however, have found success from improving old manuscripts or expanding their short stories. David Farland himself wrote his first novel by expanding his short story “On My Way to Paradise”. Likewise, all of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Games novels stemmed from one of his short stories.

What the former authors are really saying is “Don’t keep rewriting the same short story for ten years. Start something new.”

David Farland has several writing books. He recommends you purchase a copy of his Million Dollar Outlines. You can also check out his Write that Novel.

Sometimes we offer deals or coupons. Watch for them on the My Story Doctor site or on David Farland’s Facebook page or at conventions and writing conferences. If you need to pay in installments, contact David Farland’s Team to see if something can be worked out.

Some courses, both online and live, have writing exercises, but instead of the exercises being something apart from your manuscript, David Farland tried to tailor them so that they can fit into your novel.

Generally, David Farland’s assistant Dave Butler goes through each assignment and offers feedback only once. But in some courses like The Story Puzzle, you’ll sort of get reoccurring feedback, because later assignments will build off previous ones. So if you brainstormed something in assignment one, you might build off it for assignment two, and you’ll get feedback for both assignments.

For online workshops, no. You will not be critiquing others manuscripts. Your manuscript and assignments will only be critiqued by the instructor David Farland’s assistant Dave Butler.

In some live workshops, you will need to send portions of your manuscript and your outline to other students, and you will be expected to critique parts of their manuscripts and their outlines. Read the details of the live workshops to see if this applies to the one you are considering.

Once you register for Apex you can join the My Story Doctor forum. This is a new program where you can interact with other writers, join a writing group online, and so on.

Students aren’t grouped for courses, so you can join and go through the course at your own pace.

The Story Puzzle is probably the best course to start with because it guides you through the brainstorming and prewriting phase of writing a novel. But if you already have some or all of your novel written, you might want to look into other courses.

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