One Year Adventure Novel

One Year Adventure Novel is a high-school writing course that asks a student to finish a twelve-chapter adventure novel in thirty-six weeks. Taught on video by novelist Daniel Schwabauer, it is one of the few homeschool writing programs that treats teenagers as apprentice storytellers rather than essay-test candidates.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Subject-specialist, literature-informed, video-led
Worldview	Christian-evangelical (craft-focused; scripture references occasional)
Grades	9-12 (Cover Story serves grades 6-8)
Formats	Video lessons via Cloud subscription plus physical textbook, workbook, teacher guide, and the novel The Prisoner of Zenda
Cost tier	Premium
Parent intensity	2
ESA-common	Varies by state
Accredited	No
Established	Course first published by Clear Water Press in 2006
Website	clearwaterpress.com/oneyearnovel

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	4	Serious craft instruction at a college-intro level; weaker on grammar and mechanics
Ease of teaching	5	Video delivery by the author; parents grade, do not present
Content quality	5	Written by a working novelist; the craft vocabulary is real
Flexibility	3	Highly structured week-by-week; students who fall behind scramble
Value for money	3	One-year single-student license at $299 is premium pricing for a one-subject course
Worldview scope	4	Craft-first; scripture references appear occasionally in sample writing prompts
Visual/design	3	Workbook is clean and functional; video production is competent, not cinematic
Support resources	4	Active user community, summer workshop, teacher forum, Cover Story prequel

Who the publisher is

One Year Adventure Novel, usually abbreviated OYAN by its users, is the signature product of Clear Water Press, a small family-run publisher based in Olathe, Kansas. The course was created by Daniel Schwabauer, a novelist whose middle-grade fantasy series The Legends of Tira-Nor was published by WaterBrook Press (a Random House Christian imprint). Schwabauer holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Kansas and taught writing at the college level before building the OYAN curriculum around what he called "the class I wish someone had offered me in high school." The first edition shipped in 2006. The Cloud-delivered version with streaming video is the program's current and only format.

Scale is modest by homeschool-publisher standards, but the program has a devoted following. Clear Water Press runs an annual summer workshop and a student novel contest; OYAN graduates appear regularly in Christian fiction publishing, and the program's alumni community is unusually active for a single-subject curriculum. The companion courses. Cover Story for middle school (grades 6-8) and The Word Smith for advanced high school writing, form a vertical writing sequence across three grade bands.

Theologically, Clear Water Press is a Christian small press; Schwabauer's fiction appears in Christian fantasy catalogs and the program's sample essays occasionally reference scripture. But OYAN is not a devotional writing course. It is a craft course, and families from non-evangelical backgrounds, including secular, Catholic, and Jewish homeschoolers, use it without complaint because the core instruction is about plot structure, point of view, dialogue, and revision.

The core pedagogy

OYAN treats novel-writing as a sequence of craft decisions that can be taught, rehearsed, and revised. The thirty-six-week course moves through seven phases: premise, outline, first chapters, complications, climax, revision, and polish. Each week delivers two to three short video lessons (ten to fifteen minutes each), a workbook exercise, and a drafting assignment that feeds into the student's own novel-in-progress. By the end of the year, the student has written approximately 30,000 to 50,000 words of original fiction, a short novel in the young-adult genre range.

Signature mechanics: (1) Structure before style. The course insists on outlining and plot mechanics before a student drafts a scene, which inverts the instinct of most teenagers. Schwabauer argues that "discovery drafting" is the leading cause of abandoned novels, and the workbook enforces the discipline. (2) The Hero's Quest scaffold. The course teaches a simplified version of Joseph Campbell's monomyth as a working tool, not as literary theory but as a plot engine. Students identify the hero's call, threshold, allies, trials, and return, and they draft against that map. (3) The companion novel. Students read The Prisoner of Zenda (Anthony Hope's 1894 adventure novel, in the public domain) alongside their own drafting. The text is used as a worked example: every craft concept the course introduces, students trace through Hope's chapters. (4) Video-first delivery. Schwabauer teaches every lesson on camera. The parent's role is to enforce schedule, grade completion, and occasionally discuss story ideas. No presentation skill is required of the parent.

The program earns one full high-school English credit when completed, students who submit polished drafts at year's end are producing work roughly equivalent to a college intro-to-creative-writing course. Transcripts list it as "English 9/10/11/12: Creative Writing (One Year Adventure Novel, Clear Water Press)."

A day in the life

A tenth-grader using OYAN as their English credit opens the laptop at 9:00 AM, watches the day's two video lessons (roughly 20-25 minutes combined), completes the accompanying workbook exercises (15-20 minutes), then turns to the drafting slot: 45-60 minutes writing on whatever chapter the schedule assigns. Total time is typically two to two and a half hours a day, four days a week. The fifth day is left open for revision, reading The Prisoner of Zenda, or catching up on backlog. The parent's daily involvement is minimal, a check-in on workbook completion, a weekly read-aloud of the latest chapter, and a conversation about where the plot is going.

The rhythm shifts at three points in the year. Weeks 1-4 are outline-heavy and feel slow; teenagers accustomed to starting with "chapter one" complain that nothing is happening. Weeks 10-20 are drafting-heavy and feel fast; this is where most students get real momentum. Weeks 28-36 are revision-heavy and feel brutal; the program asks students to cut and rewrite scenes they have spent months building. Parents who understand this arc in advance handle the emotional weather better than those who don't.

What they do exceptionally well

Teaching plot structure to teenagers. This is the program's deepest strength. Schwabauer is a working novelist, and his explanation of inciting incidents, midpoint reversals, and climax architecture is the clearest we have seen in any high-school writing course, secular or religious. Students who complete OYAN can diagnose plot problems in films, in novels, and in their own drafts. That analytical skill transfers.

Video instruction that actually works. Unlike many homeschool video courses, where a talking head reads slides, OYAN's lessons are constructed as short craft essays with illustrations and annotated excerpts. Schwabauer is a practiced teacher, and the production holds attention for the full ten to fifteen minutes. This is the only writing course in the homeschool market we have reviewed in which parents uniformly say "the video does the teaching" rather than "the video supports the parent's teaching."

The finished novel. A tenth-grader who completes the course holds a bound draft of an original novel at the end of the year. This is not a pedagogical abstraction. OYAN students self-publish, enter contests, and apply the writing sample to college applications. The portfolio artifact matters.

What they do poorly

Grammar and mechanics. OYAN is not a grammar course, and Schwabauer does not apologize for it. Students who arrive without a solid command of sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraphing will produce drafts with real craft and real mechanical errors. Families using OYAN as the sole English credit should pair it with a grammar supplement, Fix It! Grammar or an Abeka or BJU grammar text, especially in ninth grade.

Schedule inflexibility. The thirty-six-week structure is tight, and the chapters build on each other. A student who falls two weeks behind in the outlining phase often cannot catch up without shortening the novel, and the program does not build in recovery time. Families with variable schedules (travel, co-ops, illness) should plan for a longer calendar rather than assume the 36 weeks will hold.

Premium single-student license. The Cloud subscription runs $299 for one student for one year. There is no sibling discount, and the subscription is non-transferable between students. A family with three teenagers will pay the course price three times across four years, a real number in a homeschool budget.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick OYAN if: you have a teenager who wants to write fiction and needs a structured year-long project; you want a writing course the parent does not have to teach from the front; your student already has a working command of grammar and mechanics; you value craft instruction from a practicing novelist; you can absorb a $299 single-subject course in the budget.

• Skip OYAN if: your student needs foundational grammar before they are ready for composition at this level; you want a traditional essay-and-research-paper writing course rather than fiction; your calendar cannot hold to a 36-week linear schedule; you are uncomfortable with the Christian-evangelical publisher context even when the craft material is secular; you have multiple teenagers and the per-student price compounds past your budget.

Cost honest assessment

The One Year Adventure Novel Cloud subscription is $299 per student as of April 2026, including 12 months of video access and the physical books (textbook, workbook, teacher guide, and The Prisoner of Zenda). There is no print-only version; the Cloud set is the only way to access the course. Cover Story (middle school) and The Word Smith (advanced high school) are separately priced Cloud subscriptions at similar levels.

Compared to other specialist writing programs, Institute for Excellence in Writing theme-based writing kits run roughly $100-$200 per level and rely on parent presentation; Brave Writer packages run $50-$150 per unit and require heavy parent involvement, OYAN sits at the top of the market on per-student cost but delivers video-taught instruction that other programs do not. For a family calculating the trade between tuition for an outside writing class (typically $400-$800 per semester at co-ops or online academies) and a self-paced course, the OYAN price is competitive.

Realistic all-in budget for a single high school student using OYAN as the English credit, with a grammar supplement, runs $350-$450 for the year. For three years across high school (OYAN freshman/sophomore year, then a separate research-paper program junior/senior year), the total investment approximates a single-semester community college writing class.

ESA eligibility notes

OYAN's ESA eligibility varies sharply by state. Programs that permit Christian curriculum and pre-approved vendors, Florida's Step Up for Students, Arizona's ESA marketplace via ClassWallet, and Arkansas's LEARNS Act marketplace, accept OYAN because the material is academically legitimate and the publisher has been listed as a vendor in homeschool ESA workflows. States with sharper religious-content restrictions or stricter vendor-approval processes may flag it; families should verify on their state's ESA portal before ordering. Clear Water Press does not advertise a dedicated ESA ordering workflow, so most families pay and seek reimbursement rather than use direct vendor billing.

Alternatives

• Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), a family would choose IEW over OYAN because IEW teaches transferable composition skills (structure, style, source-based writing) across grade levels rather than focusing on a single novel project, and IEW's themed writing kits integrate with history and literature content a family is already using.
• Brave Writer, a family would choose Brave Writer over OYAN because Brave Writer's Arrow and Boomerang programs teach writing through close reading of published literature across a wider range of genres and voices, with less emphasis on genre fiction and more on craft generalism.
• Cover Story. Clear Water Press's own middle-school writing course by Schwabauer's sister Amy Olsen, pitched at grades 6-8. A family would choose Cover Story first if their student is two or three years away from the OYAN level and wants the same pedagogical approach scaled down.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed Clear Water Press's course page, pricing, syllabus with lesson table, and FAQ at clearwaterpress.com in April 2026; cross-referenced Daniel Schwabauer's instructor biography and the course's Cloud product listing; confirmed the 36-week schedule and the inclusion of The Prisoner of Zenda against the syllabus; and verified Schwabauer's published fiction record through WaterBrook Press (Random House Christian) catalog listings. We cross-referenced the program's reputation against Cathy Duffy Reviews and sampled alumni discussion on the publisher's forum and summer workshop pages. Prices and course contents verified April 2026.