Recommendation: One Year Adventure Novel
A homeschooling creative writing curriculum for high school students
(Although I know that this recommendation falls somewhat outside the core of Deus in Fabula and isn’t necessarily useful to adult writers, I’m posting it for three reasons. One is that I’ve already posted excerpts from the novel I drafted as part of the program. Two, my son and I attended the One Year Adventure Novel Summer Workshop June 10-15, 2024, about when this post went live. Third, I’m writing this review to help other homeschooling families, especially non-Christian and non-religious families, who would benefit from the program but who are wondering about potential religious overtones in the program.)
One Year Adventure Novel (OYAN) is a high school creative writing program created by Daniel Schwabauer, affectionally referred to by students and their parents as “Mr S,” and published through Clear Water Press. OYAN is actually much more than a curriculum, because a student license also gives access to a lively youth writing community through age 19, even if you spend only a year doing the course itself.
My son and I did the program together in 2022-2023 during his sophomore year in high school as he is an avid reader of fantasy fiction and enjoys creative writing.1 OYAN is structured to count for a year-long English credit, if you choose to follow the rigor of the Teacher’s Guide, but it can also be done as an elective.
All the details about the course itself are available on its website, so I won’t repeat the specifics here. Instead, I want to focus on my own impressions and experience with the program.
Approach and scope
Something I’ve noticed about other courses on writing fiction, especially those for adults, is that they approach the craft as a writer-centered activity. OYAN, on the other hand, approaches it as a reader-centered activity. For example, instead of going into psychological profiles for character development with one’s protagonist and using abstract, intellectual concepts like “sympathetic,” Mr S puts it in terms of “Someone to care about.” That act of caring happens with the reader—and it works for the writer as well.
This seemingly small shift strikes me as quite profound, because it helps the writer focus less on intellect and more on feeling. Instead of thinking about how to make a character sympathetic, we focus more on feeling that sympathy through an act of caring. That helps create a much more compelling emotional hook, along with other lessons on something to want, something to dread, something to suffer, and something to learn.
What also makes the course valuable is, ironically, it’s limited scope. Mr S has distilled the story-writing process down into something that beginners can apply, drawing out and highlighting the most important elements and leaving off subtleties that one can develop later with more experience. After all, we’re talking about a program for high school students writing a draft—and only a draft—of their first novel. It’s a starting point, not an end-all by any means.
For example, Mr S asks OYAN students to write a story using the single, first-person point-of-view of the protagonist. The simple reason is that we all know how to think in first person, even when we’re young, and by sticking to that one POV the course doesn’t need to go into all the other POV like multiple first-person POV, close third-person, omniscient third-person, and observer third-person—it’s just not necessary at this level. Besides, writing in third person requires the author to be in the heads of many other characters, some of whom will most certainly be adults. But how can first-time teenage authors expect to understand what goes on in the minds of adults? Teenagers by and large don’t have that life experience.
Mr S also asks OYAN students to make the protagonist someone about their own age, and with their own gender identity. Again, this simplification means that students write from a POV they already know and understand, and the course doesn’t have to veer off into lessons about trying to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings and motivations. That requires a level of emotional maturity that, again, most teens are still developing (as are many adults, for that matter!).
Similarly, Mr S centers this curriculum on adventure or “heroic quest” stories because they generally have the simplest and most well-understood story tropes (patterns). Teenagers are probably already somewhat familiar with this genre as well, more so than, say, romance, thrillers, and police procedurals. After all, heroic quest stories are a staple of books, movies, and TV shows made for kids, so it’s a good place to start. (The OYAN lessons often use scenes from the 1950 film Cyrano de Bergerac, for example, including the one below.)
Finally, Mr S suggests that students not try to write a fantasy or science fiction novel in the program even if they love those genres. The reason is that both genres require more extensive world-building. In contrast, adventure novels set on earth in either a modern-day or historical context can rely on the reader’s shared knowledge about our world, thus greatly reducing what the novel has to explain about how the world works. That keeps students focused more on character and story. (And for those students interested in world-building, Mr S offers a follow-up program called Other Worlds.)
All together, then, the course is designed to get students started with writing fiction, not to make them experts or launch a career. As such, it can help students better decide if they want to pursue creative writing in college and perhaps Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs.
Thus, by limiting the scope, OYAN keeps the whole process on a level that’s approachable and achievable by high school students who, we must remember, have probably five other completely different courses going on at the same time! That makes it very different from a course like Writing Great Fiction that I did via The Great Courses/Wondrium about the same time. That latter program, though informative, was much more literary and intellectual and left me having accomplished various exercises, but not with the understanding of a whole novel structure, let alone a draft.
Along those lines, a point that’s covered in the program’s FAQ is that you shouldn’t expect students to come away with a publishable novel. You shouldn’t even expect that for adults. (My draft certainly needs a lot of work!) In fact, Emily Golden and Rachael May have said on their Story Magic podcast that published novels undergo an average of ten revisions/edits between first draft and publication. Ten. Even the most experienced novelists like Stephen King still do at least three revisions. In other words, no first draft is publishable.2 That’s why it’s a draft, and that’s why editing is a huge part of the process of writing a novel, especially for new authors.
Potential downsides
If there’s a fault with the program, it’s that Mr S in his video lessons tends to speak in somewhat absolute terms with words like “always” and “never,” leaving little wiggle room. Nor does he hesitate to admit when he just plain hates something, like horror movies and “penny dreadfuls” that make few demands upon readers and usually have little or nothing to offer in terms of morality or meaning. That attitude strikes me as a bit overdone, and if you’re concerned about it, you’ll want to watch the videos with your students, like I did, so that you can pause and interpret and/or soften as necessary (which usually spawned some good discussions!). In time, once we understood Mr S’s style, we learned to just let such statements slide.
Oftentimes, the places where we stopped for a little discussion concerned what I consider to be dogmas within the fiction writing community. For example, Mr S repeats the drum-beat that emotion and conflict are the foundations of storytelling, as befits his own training and experience as a writer and a writing instructor. There’s some truth in those claims, but I think there are also higher octaves to consider. In fact, his insistence on this matter is what stimulated the posts here on Deus in Fabula called “Emotion, ‘inpletion,’ and devotion.”
All that said, I appreciate his insistence on writing stories that at least try to follow some kind of a moral compass and try to have some meaningful messages. As I’ve looked at modern novels, many if not most of them clearly lack both.3 I can thus share some of Mr S’s dismay at the dearth of morality and meaning in fiction and can see why it might come through on occasion in his teaching style.
A second downside is that the novels he draws from as examples, such as The Prisoner of Zenda (which students read during the first semester), are old, public-domain works. He also draws from older movies in his video lessons, as noted earlier. Though I understand the practicality of using such sources, given that they are free from licensing and legal hassles, I would’ve also liked to see some examples from more modern works. That said, it was easy enough for me to find clips from other movies and passages from other books that demonstrated and reinforced the same principles.
A third potential concern that other homeschoolers, especially “secular” ones, have expressed with OYAN is that Mr S, as a person, is open with his faith and his values. That said, he doesn’t bludgeon you in the OYAN lessons with all that. In fact, here’s the official statement about whether OYAN contains religious material from the FAQ:
The One Year Adventure Novel curriculum is non-sectarian, and is approved for purchase with public funding. It is a writing program, not religious instruction. However, the instructor himself is a Christian, and everything taught in the course is compatible with a biblical worldview.
Most of the families who use our programs are Christians, but we also have families who are secular or of a different faith.
Having met Mr S and talked with him at length, he’s simply honest about who he is. He’s confident and centered in his own faith and doesn’t need others to validate it for him. Choices and opinions that arise from that faith are there, of course, but honestly, how is that different from the socio-political opinions of many other people? For myself, I prefer people of faith and devotion to God over those whose devotion is directed toward materialism and political systems (though I loathe members of any group who use their particular devotion to claim superiority over others).
If there’s any part of the curriculum that more clearly arises from his faith, it’s again that he encourages young writers to engage with stories (in reading and writing) that mean something to them and that contain some semblance of moral consciousness. I wholeheartedly agree, because there’s too much fiction out there that lacks both, or fiction that glorifies questionable ethics (the lack of morality), promotes the philosophy of meaninglessness, indulges in wanton sensuality, and/or raises the individual ego as the pinnacle of human development without any relationship to a greater reality (the cult of “me, me, me” or “radical individualism”).
So, if the likes of Marx, Sartre, and Richard Dawkins occupy your altars, if you’re as fanatical about atheism as other people seem to be about religion, or if you enjoy moral bankruptcy, then I don’t think OYAN is for you. But if you think there are worthwhile moral values (whether religious or secular), if you believe that there is meaning in the universe, and you wish that more fiction would reflect values of some kind and provide some meaning, then I think you’ll find this program supportive in ways that other fiction writing programs are not.
Beyond the curriculum: forum, webinars, and contests
All licensed students for OYAN are invited to participate in the optional student forum, which, by nature of the program’s licensing, is not open to the general public. Students can participate in discussions, post material for critique, and receive critique on their own writing. But it’s not just about writing. From what my son reports, only about half of the discussions are about writing; the other half is about whatever else that teens like to talk about.
A huge benefit is that the forum is actively moderated by young adults (usually college students) who are OYAN graduates, making it an entirely safe online space. It’s also fine for students to remain anonymous behind a handle or forum name. In fact, my son knows a number of people by their forum names only—when we attended the summer workshop in 2023 it took a while for him to attach those handles to the real people!
The student license is perpetual, which allows students to continue participating in the forum until they reach age 20. So, if you start early, OYAN gives your child a supportive and safe online community for many years. That alone could be worth the price of the course, even if you don’t work through all the materials.
Mr S also gives a series of casual, hour-long webinars during the school year to touch on topics that aren’t included in the curriculum. Topics include overview of other genres like romance and mystery, how to write great openings and hooks, and going deeper with story goals and themes. These webinars are available as recordings on the forum afterwards.
Finally, OYAN sponsors an annual novel contest for licensed students with generous cash prizes. The purpose here is to encourage highly motivated students to work through the revision process and to also receive feedback from the OYAN staff if their novel is selected as a finalist.
Summer workshop
After attending in 2023, my son and I came up with a suitable line to describe the OYAN Summer Workshop: “Where else can you find a Lutheran minister giving a talk entitled ‘How to kill people’”?
Well, the minister in question was John Otte, who writes fantasy novels on the side.4 And his talk about writing character deaths, not real-world homicide!
Anyway, students who have an OYAN license are invited to attend the annual OYAN Summer Workshop held at the MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, KS, a suburb of Kansas City. Like I said, we attended in 2023 and again in 2024.
The overall workshop consists of class sessions, student critique groups, an open mic night and various other fun activities, and just hanging out with other book/writer nerds, which includes in-person time with friends you’ve made the forum or in previous workshops. Some students attend more for some parts, less for others. My son, for example, particular likes the critique groups as well as having some (but not too much) social time, which is important for a homeschooler. Thus, the summer workshop brings together story, writing, and socialization, much like the forum.
As an in-person event, the summer workshop is a place where you will encounter open expressions of faith that are not present in the curriculum and are rare on the forum. But those expressions are not “fundamentalist” by any stretch—most of the attendees, for one thing, enjoy fantasy fiction with all its magic and monsters and alternate realities—Mr S himself has several fantasy and sci-fi novels in print. There are religious circles in which fantasy (even C. S. Lewis and Tolkien) is verboten and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are considered satanic. But that’s not the OYAN crowd, nor is it true within the broader “Christian Spec-Fic” (fantasy and science fiction) communities.
Expressions of faith primarily arise in the context of presentations as the adult speakers are Christians who are open with and incorporate their faith into their talks to various degrees. To put it visually, imagine a spectrum with “pure writing craft” on one side and “religious sermons” on the other. In my experience of two workshops, in 2023 and 2024, sessions can range anywhere from 100% craft to perhaps something with 75% (but not 100%) sermon depending on the topic in question.
Sessions about writing craft tend to have little or no explicitly religious content; perhaps they draw examples from the Bible, but in that case the Bible is being used in a literary rather than religious sense. Sessions related to personal mindset or more philosophical topics, on the other hand, will likely incorporate more religious content, such as approaching one’s writing as an expression of one’s faith. For example, author Nadine Brandes spoke in 2024 on the trap of perfectionism in writing, making key points about the need to surrender the ego into an active partnership with God. Brandes essentially outlined a devotional approach to creative work with which I wholly agree. For myself, however, being a disciple of Christ but not a mainstream Christian, I had to filter out some of her jargon, preachiness, and occasional claims to sectarian exclusivity, none of which seemed particularly necessary for the topic at hand. But that’s just her style.
The same was true for Allen Arnold, who gave a number of presentations in 2024. But although I don’t express my faith as he does, he yet offered many statements of truth. The same was true for other speakers such as Mr. Schwabauer, Megan Gerig, and Stephanie Morrill, who made their points with a much softer touch. Like I said, it varies with the speaker.5
Consider also the alternative to such openly religious content. If I attended a secular writing conference, for example, then I’d not expect a session on perfectionism to say anything at all about surrendering the ego and partnering with God. I’d expect it to be purely psychological and essentially materialistic in nature. As such, I’d find it necessary to mentally insert certain spiritual aspects and would find it necessary to filter our materialistic jargon, skepticism, and equally exclusionary claims of materialistic dogma.
At such a secular conference, too, I’d probably have to hide the spiritual aspects of myself in social settings and smaller group discussions, like critique groups, lest I be ostracized as a religious fanatic. (I haven’t attended such conferences, so I can’t say for sure.) At the OYAN Summer Workshop, I can be more open with who I am, even if I need to adjust my terminology a little to better align with others. And the pieces I brought to the OYAN parent’s critique group in both 2023 and 2024 were ones that I would have been very hesitant to bring to a secular group.
Given the choice, then, especially with my own quest for spiritual devotional, and mystical realism in fiction, I much prefer to mix with people of faith than with abject materialists, and I prefer starting with the spiritual approach and mentally universalizing it over starting with a materialistic approach and having to mentally spiritualize it.
The bottom line is that the Summer Workshop is an amplified extension of OYAN itself and the style of the videos, with an added injection of faith. If you're comfortable the OYAN course, don’t mind being in an environment populated mostly by people of faith, and are confident in your own spiritual choices, then chances are that you and your children will enjoy the workshop.
In closing
All in all, One Year Adventure Novel is a unique and worthwhile curriculum that also brings a community along with it. Although I haven’t done an exhaustive search, I don’t think there’s really anything else like it out there. And so long as you’re not a staunch atheist or a non-Christian fundamentalist, what elements in the program that arise from faith are easy enough to let pass if that’s a concern. I certainly wouldn’t discount the program on that basis alone.
If you have any other questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments.
Because OYAN is designed for teens, interested adult writers should go instead to Schwabauer’s Story Coach program.
Self-publishing, unfortunately, has made it possible for many authors to publish first drafts without much revision and editing, but I’m really referring to quality standards that agents and traditional publishers look for.
I looked at one “mafia romance” title recently that is basically X-rated, but it’s not like you should expect much else from such a genre to begin with.
Otte has recently set active ministry aside to teach high-school English.
I’ll add that I’ve never been asked to explain my particular spiritual preferences nor has anyone made attempts to convert me to some sectarian point of view. It’s just not a venue for that.
An additional thought I'll add is that many adults who aspire to write novels never get to the point of completing a whole draft. The fact that OYAN gets students through that first draft gets them over a huge barrier. Once they complete the course, they'll always be able to say that they completed at least one draft.