Hi, my name is john Lynch, and I'm a writer. Sounds like an introduction from Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't. This is the first in a series of quite short classes on how to write a novel. I write contemporary fiction and historical fiction in my own name. And since I began in 1990, I've written more than 60 books as a ghostwriter. But I'm not teaching this class because I'm a writer.

Why would I? I'm teaching this class because, as well as being a writer, I'm a publisher. I went into publishing with a friend about five years ago. She's also a writer. We're a small publisher. So far, we published books by six different writers.

But even smaller publishers received large numbers of submissions from people who hope to be published writers, because we're both writers and we know how it feels to send your book out and not hear a damn thing or get a rejection that shows the publisher hasn't read The book, we make a point of reading everything that's sent to us, not usually the whole book, but certainly the first 30 pages. That's usually enough to know whether we want to read on. Most of the submissions we receive are unpublishable, there's often the germ of a good story there. But the writers make the same mistakes over and over again, the characters aren't convincing. They tell us things instead of showing them to us, the structure is hopeless. There's no conflict or no theme.

Or it's a long list. A lot of those mistakes could be put right if the writer knew they were making them. That's why I'm creating these short classes on the various things that novice writers get wrong, and how to fix them. Our hope is that the quality of submissions will improve. to benefit from this course you need two things you need to be able to write and you need to be able to Keep going. Because far more novels are started than ever get finished.

If you have those two skills, this set of courses will teach you how to be a successful novelist much faster than the usual writing apprenticeship involving years of trying and being rejected. In this first course, I'm going to ease you into the process with a fairly light hearted look at something all would be novelists need to learn. How do you write about sex without writing about sex? If you want to know why you shouldn't write about sex when you're writing about sex, move to the next video. It will all be made clear then. I'll see you there.