Description: Take your fiction to the next level! Maybe you're a first-time novelist looking for practical guidance. Maybe you've already been published, but your latest effort is stuck in mid-list limbo. Whatever the case may be, author and literary agent Donald Maass can show you how to take your prose to the next level and write a breakout novel - one that rises out of obscurity and hits the best-seller lists. Maass details the elements that all breakout novels share - regardless of genre - then sho you writing techniques that can make your own books stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace. You'll learn to: establish a powerful and sweeping sense of time and place weave subplots into the main action for a complex, engrossing story create larger-than-life characters that step right off the page explore universal themes that will interest a broad audience of readers sustain a high degree of narrative tension from start to finish develop an inspired premise that sets your novel...