Graduate Essay: “Getting the Big Picture” by Jade Cannon

Jade Cannon is a graduate of the 2025 Odyssey Online class “Getting the Big Picture: The Key to Revising Your Novel.” Writing has been Jade’s creative outlet since she was old enough to string sentences into stories. She wrote her first “chapter book” in third grade—two binders totaling over 100 handwritten pages—and continued writing throughout high school. She became a yoga teacher in 2015 and obtained a degree with concentrations in Eastern Philosophy, Exercise Science, and Behavioral Health in 2021. Currently, she works as an adjunct professor at her local community college. Over the last few years, she’s returned to her first love—writing. Her dream is to deliver the teachings of eastern thought and yoga philosophy through the lens of adult fantasy novels.

Writing is one thing, but it takes an entirely different skillset to craft a story that captivates the mind and ignites a reader’s heart. It took me years to recognize this truth—that there’s more to storytelling than simply sitting down and writing about characters and events. I thought interesting ideas, beautiful prose, and impeccable mechanics were enough to captivate a reader.

I was wrong.

Before I took the Odyssey Online class Getting the Big Picture, my path between bright ideas and final products was a simple one. Sit down. Write words. Go back and make them pretty. Then, find a willing victim and thrust those beautiful, soulless words into their unsuspecting hands.

When I decided to query my first “real” novel, developing a cohesive synopsis and distilling the heart of my work into a query letter was daunting. A one-sentence elevator pitch? Impossible. I thought my story was too big and beautiful to shove into such a small box. After dozens of rejections by the publishing industry, I began to realize that a string of beautiful words and seemingly interesting events did not equate to a publishable manuscript. I was missing something vital.

Writing a story that grips a reader by the heart, drags them deep into unfamiliar worlds, and immerses them in new experiences requires authors to understand the beating soul beyond the prose. So, I dove into story structures and came across advice that shattered my creative heart: Outline your books before writing them.

If you’re a discovery writer like me, some part of you probably died a little reading that. Plotting ahead of time douses the fire and inspiration that drives a pantser’s creative process.

Without methods to dig deep into those heart-led stories, authors often end up querying a manuscript that looks more like a field of wildflowers than a sculpted garden. Beautiful, but not what the industry is looking for.

Plotting ahead of time is one remedy, but Getting the Big Picture helped me realize there’s another way. It didn’t matter if we were pantsers or plotters, gardeners or architects. Our stories could thrive if we were willing to embrace the hard work of structural revisions. Instructor Barbara Ashford’s lessons helped us identify and extract the weeds choking life from our stories, enabling us to turn beautiful wild prairies of early drafts into the flourishing, sculpted garden of a finished novel.

The most important aspect of this process was connecting with the heart, or the core, of our stories. The heart is the emotional promise a story makes to meet a universal human need. Well-crafted plots drive characters—and the reader—toward fulfillment of that desire. Love, freedom, healing, and redemption are just some of the needs that stories fulfill. The promise of fulfillment drives us to keep reading. Breathing life into soulless prose requires identifying the emotional need that drives the reader forward and delivering on the promise to fulfill it.

Getting the Big Picture teaches how to use that emotional thread to weave characters with goals and lessons into plots that would force them to grow. The lessons I learned gave me the tools I needed to weave that life force into every aspect of my story. The invaluable feedback I received from Barbara and my classmates was painfully honest and wonderfully thoughtful. They helped me connect with the beating heart of my manuscript. The assignments enabled me to identify places between the plot and character arcs where the pulse was weakest.

The opportunity to read others’ writing with an eye for revision was just as useful. I learned a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses and gained a fresh perspective on my own work. Connections I made during the course have provided me with a small network of writers who understand the value of honest and constructive feedback and have allowed me to build on everything we learned through continued critique exchanges.

When I finally understood the driving heart of my story, I learned how to use it to develop a focused character and plot synopsis that became a dynamic tool to enhance my manuscript. This newfound clarity helped me direct my focus and make meaningful structural revisions. By the end of the class, distilling my manuscript into a query letter and story synopsis became easy because I finally understood what I was trying to say.

Getting the Big Picture is the best investment I have made toward becoming a better writer. It helped me gain a clear, comprehensive picture of my manuscript and demystified the techniques authors use to make a story engaging and infuse life into all those beautiful words. I would highly recommend this course to any writer who feels driven to connect with the heart of their story and bring it to life.

Keep an eye here and on the Odyssey website for information on the 2026 Odyssey Online Classes—coming soon!