Learn to write it yourself

A proper academy: learn how to write a book and keep your craft alive.

Academy of Story is an online campus for authors and soon-to-be authors, where they learn the craft, practise it in a structured way, and never write alone again.

▸ Join the Academy

Four ways in…

Member

Your way into the community. Meet writers at your stage in the Academy feed, find your momentum, and get a monthly Creativity Bulletin of prompts, craft tips, and community highlights, plus the occasional
write-along and live event. This is for you if you’re not ready for the full commitment of being Student, but still want to be in the energy of the Academy.

Become a Member

Book Club

Everything a Member gets, plus one book a month, chosen for what it can teach you. We mix it up between Classics, myths, the old stories that modern fiction is built on, and some contemporary best-sellers. We read with craft in mind, and we think deeply about the meaning of each story. Come to fight the brain rot brought on by short-form content, fill your head with storytelling that’s stood the rest of time, and learn how to apply the craft to your thinking.

Join the Club

Student

Enter as an active Student for the tools and accountability to actually write your book: weekly Office Hours with Dr. Shelly, the Plan It foundation course that takes you from an idea to a complete blueprint, craft lessons and primers, live monthly masterclasses and workshops with the full archive, a brand-new writing challenge every month, and the whole challenge library. And the Bookclub is included!

Enrol Now

Write It

Write It is the year-long programme that carries you from blueprint to a finished first draft of your book across eleven modules, one chapter at a time. It’s self-paced yet guided with regular Office Hours and events to get coached through the writing by Dr. Shelly herself. During your year in Write It, you’ll also get access to the Academy at the Student level so that you can join in the thriving campus life that’ll keep you motivated.

Write It

Go deeper · Write It

Ready to be coached through writing the whole book,
not just a lesson at a time? Write It is the next step, in two shapes.

Write It (Solo)

Flat lay of a green vintage typewriter, papers, and pens on a wooden desk.

The Academy’s year-long guided programme, taking you from blueprint to a finished first draft, one chapter at a time, across 11 in-depth modules built to work with you week by week. Worked through whenever you’re ready to sit down and do the thing.

▸ Join the Write It waitlist

Write It (Cohort)

A hand holding a pen writing in an open notebook on a wooden table.

Once a year, the whole programme run live as a group, plus time with Dr. Shelly coaching you through the actual writing. The one that puts you in the room with her.

▸ Join the cohort waitlist

MEET YOUR GUIDE

The Academy is led by Dr. Shelly Lorts:

Book coach, writing teacher, storytelling scholar, and author. She has spent more than fifteen years teaching people how stories work, from university classrooms to private book coaching, with a focus on structure, character, rhetoric, mythology, and the strange alchemy that turns an interesting idea into a story a reader wants to follow. Inside the Academy, she’ll teach you the craft and guide you through the ups and downs of becoming an author.

New Here?

Start with the free Author Challenge and see how we work before you commit to a thing. Then, when you’re ready to be coached through the whole book, there’s Write It, the Academy’s year-long guided programme that takes you from blueprint to a finished first draft, one chapter at a time.

▸ Take the free Author Challenge

▸ Enter the Academy of Story

Join the Write It waitlist