A number of key elements set Your Personal Odyssey apart from other workshops.

• A unique one-on-one experience combining in-depth lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring.
• A workshop customized for you, that moves at your pace, allows you to focus on the areas that will help you most, and responds to your needs.
• An advanced, comprehensive curriculum that covers the elements of fiction writing through intensive lectures, providing the tools and techniques you need to improve. Receiving feedback on your work and learning your weaknesses doesn’t help unless you have the tools to strengthen those areas.
• A single instructor/mentor, Jeanne Cavelos, former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell and winner of the World Fantasy Award, guides you through the entire experience, gaining in-depth knowledge of your work, providing detailed assessments of your strengths and weaknesses, helping you target your weaknesses one by one, and charting your progress.
• Deep mentoring sessions give you the opportunity to ask questions and explore concepts, set learning goals and plans, discuss challenges you’re facing in your writing, brainstorm solutions to story problems, and be supported, helped, and guided through your journey to improve your writing.
• Top writers, editors, and agents serve as guest lecturers and critiquers, providing their own insights, perspectives, and feedback on your work.
• A challenging yet supportive atmosphere focused on helping you improve as much as possible during the program.
• Critiques are designed to maximize their usefulness. You will not be coddled, and you will not be attacked. Critiques are unflinchingly honest, concrete, and detailed.
• Jeanne provides you with an editor’s perspective on your work. Her experience working with many different writers allows her to help you find the best writing process for you.
• Jeanne’s critiques on stories average over 1,500 words, and her line edits and marginal comments on manuscripts are extensive. You will not receive feedback of this depth at other workshops.
• While students are encouraged to work on short fiction, since improvement comes faster that way, students focused only on novels are allowed to work on long fiction.
• Alumni resources, including a mastermind group, a discussion group, a critique group, a newsletter, and an annual one-week workshop, allow you to learn from and interact with graduates who are building major writing careers for themselves. They also help you continue your lifelong odyssey to become the best writer you can be.

Odyssey alumni are taking the publishing world by storm! Fifty-nine percent of Odyssey graduates have gone on to be published, the highest success rate we’ve been able to find. Even since 1996, alumni are building major writing careers for themselves. Chances are you’re reading the work of Odyssey alumni without even realizing it. Their stories and novels have been published by almost every major publisher. Take a look at our Graduates’ Publications page to get an overview of the success of graduates. It’s hard to keep up with all the publications and awards of the graduates, but we do our best.

Only twelve total, four students in each of the three sessions. That allows Your Personal Odyssey to provide each student with a program responsive to their needs.

Remember that Your Personal Odyssey is a one-on-one experience. You will not be part of a class or cohort. You’ll receive in-depth, one-on-one mentoring from me, and several one-on-one meetings with guest critiquers. You will be following the unique path that is most helpful for you, that teaches you the skills you need to improve the most.

I encourage you to work on short fiction, simply because you can learn and improve more quickly when writing short pieces. If you write something short, then we can look at it as a whole, and figure out whether it works or not, which elements are weak and which are strong, and how the weak elements could be improved.

In critiquing a chapter of a novel, we can figure out some of those issues, but since the work is not complete, some problems might be difficult to detect until the entire book is done (for example, the chapter might be well written and interesting, but it may be unnecessary to the book).

That said, though, I understand that some people tend to think in long forms rather than short ones (I’m one of those people myself). And I believe that the most important thing is that you work on projects that you’re passionate about. So when people come to me and say they really want to work on a novel at Your Personal Odyssey, I explain to them that their progress may be a little slower and the issues they’re dealing with more complex. Then I let them work on what they feel most excited about because I don’t think churning out short stories for the sake of churning out short stories ever really taught anyone much. After conferring with me, a few students switch over to short story projects they’ve been wanting to work on, but many go through the program working on novels.

In the lectures, we cover all the major elements of fiction writing, and specifically discuss the challenges those elements present in f/sf/h fiction. We also discuss how these issues differ in short fiction and long fiction. So different aspects of novel writing are covered.

In one-on-one mentoring sessions, I try to help students writing novels to apply those various concepts to their work. I try to get a short outline from them at the beginning, which we can discuss.

Sometimes students revise the outline as we move ahead, or come to mentoring sessions with various questions regarding “big picture” issues of the novel

I also sometimes point students to special readings or exercises to help them with specific points. These may involve issues particular to longer fiction. As you submit more chapters for critiquing, I’ll get a better sense of how those chapters fit into your outline, and a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the overall story structure, which we’ll discuss.

It can be extremely difficult to get some emotional distance from a novel and see it objectively, as a reader sees it; that’s one of the important things Your Personal Odyssey provides. Students also see much more clearly the weaknesses in their novels, and they learn the skills to tackle those and make major improvements.

Writers of middle-grade and young-adult fiction are welcome to apply to Your Personal Odyssey. There’s no requirement that you have to write for adults.

The tuition quoted on the workshop page is the discounted rate available to students paying by check or bank draft in US dollars. You may also pay tuition through PayPal. PayPal allows you to charge expenses to your credit card. Those using PayPal need to pay the full rates, which are about 3% higher.

As an editor and the director of Odyssey, I have worked with many different writers. I know that each writer works differently, and each writer is trying to say something original and distinct. I’ve found that many writing teachers try to mold students in their own image, and that’s something I won’t do. An editor’s job is to help writers become the best they can be. Rather than teaching you the “right” way to work, and the “right” things to write about, I try to help you find the best writing process for you, and to help you better write what you want to write.

When I critique stories, I give you an editor’s point of view, telling you what might excite an editor, what might turn off an editor, when an editor might stop reading your story, and when an editor might decide to buy your story. If you want to succeed as a professional writer, insight into how editors think and work can be very helpful.

This really depends on the individual. Some of the people accepted into Your Personal Odyssey have been writing for decades and have multiple finished novels, or many, many short stories. Others may have been writing only a year, with only a handful of finished pieces, but they’re all of a very high quality.

The main thing to consider is that you should not embark on Your Personal Odyssey until you have a strong sense of who you are as a writer and what you have to say. Otherwise, you can be overly influenced by feedback. After getting a few critiques, a student may feel tempted to write stories that she thinks will please the critiquers. These won’t be stories she feels passionate about, or stories that embody something special she has to say; they’ll be tailored to avoid negative comments.

This is a common phenomenon in many college writing programs. Students come into the program writing very differently from each other, but leave the program all writing alike. You don’t want that to happen to you.

There’s no publishing requirement. The writing sample you send with your application will reveal the level of your writing skills, and the information on your application will tell me your level of commitment to writing and what your goals are.

That said, most students accepted into Your Personal Odyssey have had publications of some kind. Perhaps they’re in a major magazine, perhaps in a minor one. They might be in a school literary journal or local newspaper. The publications aren’t what gets these applicants accepted, but they do reflect these writers’ commitment.

The program is designed for adults and is comparable to a master’s-level college course. But there is no minimum age requirement. Over the years, we’ve admitted a few students to Odyssey who were under 18. They were extremely talented and responsible for their ages. Stephen Chambers, who attended Odyssey when he was 17, sold his first two novels to Tor Books before he turned 18.

If your skills are at a level similar to the other students, then I would be happy to have you. The one caution I would give is that you also need to be mature enough to handle receiving feedback on your work. While critiques are always focused on giving the author feedback that is truthful and helpful, having your story critiqued can be painful, no matter what your age. You put a lot of effort into your stories, and it’s difficult to hear people say anything negative about them. But that’s how you learn to improve. So you need to be able to handle this process.

You will be critiquing stories or novel excerpts from the Odyssey Library chosen specifically to help you improve a particular area of your writing.  If you’re trying to learn more about plot, then critiquing a story that has clear problems with plot can help you become more aware of what makes a plot strong or weak, and it can help you develop skills to improve weak plots.  We’ll discuss your critiques to further increase your awareness of the various elements you’re trying to improve.

You’ll also be receiving critiques from me and several guest critiquers.  You’ll receive a written critique on your submission, and then you’ll meet online with your critiquer for a one-on-one discussion.

The philosophy by which we operate is that all feedback given on stories must be truthful and helpful. This may seem obvious, but many workshops don’t operate on these principles.

What this means is that everything said about a submission should be true. You shouldn’t say “I liked it” if you didn’t like it. Similarly, you shouldn’t say something bad about a story just to make yourself sound clever, if you don’t really believe what you say.

Also, everything you say should be helpful. Saying “This story sucked” is not helpful. The author has no idea what’s wrong or how to fix it. This doesn’t mean critiques have to be gentle and “nice.” You’re not doing an author any favors by telling him his work is great when it’s not. You’re actually doing him a serious disservice. But your criticisms must give the author some idea what’s wrong and how he might begin to fix the problem. So you might say, “Your characters are all flat. I didn’t believe for a moment that any of them was a real human being with a real history and real problems and desires.” That criticism may be difficult for the author to hear, but it is truthful and helpful, and absolutely critical to any writer wanting to improve.

This is a difficult question to answer.  Writers write and work at different speeds.  Does it take you 10 hours to write a story or novel chapter?  50 hours?  100 hours?

My best (and very rough) estimate, based on students at Odyssey, is that completing Your Personal Odyssey will require a minimum of 420 hours of work total.  That includes writing your submissions, critiquing pieces from the Odyssey Library, doing journal entries, designing and completing your individualized assignments, and watching the video lectures.

If you want to give these tasks more time, then it will take longer.  Of course, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

If you choose the 6-week session, you’ll need to complete a minimum of 70 hours of work per week.  If you choose the 3-month session, you’ll have to complete a minimum of 35 hours of work per week.  If you choose the 6-month session, you’ll need to complete a minimum of 18 hours of work per week.

When thinking about whether Your Personal Odyssey is right for you, and which session would work best, think about your writing and working pace, and what other responsibilities and demands on your time you’ll have.

Your Personal Odyssey is set up to allow writers to work at their own pace.  But, at any speed, it does involve a lot of work, so you can maximize your progress.  You should make sure that you’ll have the time to get the most out of it.

Two of your submissions will be critiqued by guest critiquers.  You will receive their written critiques and then meet online with them for a one-on-one discussion.

Guest lecturers allow you to watch videos of their lectures and question-and-answer sessions to aid your learning. You will not be meeting with them, but the unique perspectives and real-world experiences they share can be invaluable.

Completing Your Personal Odyssey requires great commitment and energy.  But it is only one stage in a writer’s lifelong journey to grow and improve.  To aid in the continuation of this journey, we’ve set up a variety of resources.  Those who successfully complete Your Personal Odyssey will be invited to join a mastermind group with other Odyssey graduates, where you can continue your learning, exchange critiques, help each other solve problems, and find companionship and support.  You’ll also be invited to join the Odyssey discussion and critique boards and become part of the wider Odyssey community. And you’ll become eligible to be invited to The Never-Ending Odyssey, the 8-day program for Odyssey workshop graduates.

The references should be people who are familiar with your writing. The ideal reference would be an expert of some type–a published writer, a writing teacher, an editor. If there is no expert who is familiar with your work, then the next best choice would be a peer, someone who has about the same level of writing knowledge as you–a fellow member of a writers’ group, someone with whom you’ve exchanged manuscripts. If no one has seen your work except for friends or family members, then list them as references.

You should, of course, ask these people for permission to use them as references before putting their names on the application.

I look for a number of different qualities in the writing samples submitted with the applications. The one I value most is originality–the sense that the author is trying to say something that only they can say, and they’re trying to say it in their own unique way. I also look for evidence of strong stylistic skills–clear and compelling sentences, vivid sensory details, a powerful, consistent voice, proper grammar and punctuation, and strong word choice. And, of course, I look for strong story elements–a vivid setting, a clear and consistent point of view, a believable character with a goal and an internal conflict, and a well-structured plot that builds through a causal chain to a climax.

Most applicants who are accepted have one element that really stands out as exceptional, while the other elements may have flaws but do show the skill level necessary. It’s important for writers to be at a fairly advanced level before taking Your Personal Odyssey, so they can profit the most from what the workshop has to offer.

Many people need to know months ahead of time whether they’ve been accepted into the workshop or not, so they can make arrangements for time off, child care, and so on. The early application system is set up for them.

Any applications received by January 31 are automatically considered for early admission. At that time, I read all the applications that have come in, evaluate them, and pick a small number of applicants (usually 3) to admit. Those 3 are sent acceptance letters by the end of February, and they pay a deposit in March to enroll. This early schedule allows the admitted students plenty of time to make plans for their session.

The rest of the applicants are sent notices that their applications are being held over and will be considered again after the regular application deadline, on an equal basis with the rest of the applications.

It is a bit harder to be accepted under early admission, since only a handful of applicants are admitted at that time. But granting only a few applicants early admission ensures that we leave most of the spaces open until the regular application deadline, so everyone is given a fair shot at acceptance.

Those who don’t need so much advance notice often opt to apply by the regular application deadline, using the extra time to work on their application stories.

One option isn’t “better” than the other. Your application will receive fair consideration whether you submit it early or at the last minute–as long as it arrives by the regular application deadline. It’s just a matter of figuring out which option is better for you.

Most applicants submit unpublished work, since they’re usually sending in something they’ve just finished, which they think best represents the current state of their skills. If an applicant is accepted, I do a full critique on the application piece and we discuss it in a one-on-one session early in the workshop.

Some applicants submit published work. There is no rule against sending in a published piece, though it is discouraged. If the applicant is admitted, then I need them to immediately send another piece that I can critique in place of the application story, so they aren’t “wasting” that critique slot on a story that has already reached its final form. This requires more reading on my part, which is why I discourage it. But if you feel that a published piece best represents the current state of your skills, send it in. It is probably the right piece to send with your application, and doing so will not hurt your chances of admission.

In fantasy and science fiction, many stories and novels show the protagonist working with a mentor, building skills, exploring ideas, and gaining a greater understanding of the activity the protagonist wants to master.  That’s what Your Personal Odyssey will be like.  Working one-on-one means that your struggles, your goals, your needs, and your questions will be at the center of our discussions.  You will not be part of a class or cohort.  You’ll receive deep mentoring from me and several one-on-one meetings with guest critiquers that will help you follow the unique path that is most helpful for you, that teaches you the skills you need to improve the most.

Long ago, editors at publishing houses used to correspond with developing writers over several years, mentoring them and helping them bring their skills up to publication level.  When I was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, I saw the last remnants of that practice fading away.  Your Personal Odyssey allows you to have that deep mentoring experience and combines that with the lectures, readings, exercises, critiques, writing, and feedback that will help you make major improvements to your writing.

I’ll use my experience as an editor for 8 years and the primary instructor at Odyssey for 26 years to give you the best guidance I can. We’ll explore the unique opportunities and challenges you face as a writer.  We’ll be looking at your writing process and its connection to the strengths and weaknesses in your work.  We’ll discuss which weakness you want to target first and discuss possible techniques that could help you improve that weak area.  As Your Personal Odyssey continues, we’ll target your weak areas one by one and chart your progress.  We’ll work together on creating your individualized assignment for each module. We’ll discuss the lectures you’ve watched and the readings, journal entries, and critiques you’ve done and how they can lead to improvements in your writing.  We’ll discuss the feedback I’ve provided on your latest submission, and whether your attempt to improve a weak area led to a stronger story. When you have a submission due for a guest critiquer, I’ll be there beforehand if you want to brainstorm or discuss the piece you’re writing, and I’ll be there afterward to discuss the insights the guest provided. I’ll answer your questions, and we’ll discuss any problems, difficulties, or concerns you have.  In short, I’ll do my best to help you make progress on your unique writing journey.

Yes.  You’re welcome to submit fiction in any genre, especially if it helps you learn and grow.  But you should keep in mind that Odyssey’s nonprofit mission is to help writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and Your Personal Odyssey is focused on those genres.  I would expect that the majority of your submissions would fall within the umbrella of fantastic fiction.  If your primary interest is in some other genre, Your Personal Odyssey is probably not the right program for you.

Yes.   Because this program is so different from the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Odyssey graduates can apply to Your Personal Odyssey.

Yes.  Because the program is customized for you, and you can explore different aspects of writing and work on different projects, you can apply to take it a second time.  We’ll also be adding new lectures each year to provide helpful new content.