Margo

The scientist, astronomer, and author, Carl Sagan, on the magic of books:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

(excerpt from the Writer’s Digest)

• begin at a pivotal moment
• add an unusual situation
• add an intriguing character
• conflict
• add an antagonist
• change emotion
• irony and surprise
• make people wonder
• dread factor
• keep narrative voice compelling

 

Have fun!

The wonderful thing about fiction: the meaning of a story is contained in the way it unscrolls, in the experience the reader has, phrase by phrase. Everything else—the analysis we tend to feel the need to do—is reductive (fun, but reductive). The reading experience, when you think about it, is so complex and lovely and hard to describe: ideas come up and are complicated and refined by the next beat; moral notions arise and are challenged; the language surprises; parallel images from our own life are continually invoked; questions that, in our everyday mode, we’d be more simply opinionated about are endorsed and negated and complicated. All this happens at once, and in a granulated way that’s impossible to describe. I think it’s important to be respectful of how mysterious the whole deal is: a person being moved by a story another person made up. It’s weird but it happens and it can really change people’s lives. I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren’t necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn’t get cocky. ~ George Saunders

 

 

Timeless Advice from 1932-1933

My favorites are 1,7,10,11

Which are yours?

Leave a comment so I know.

41.) Vivid moment – some reflection of moment by adult

42.) BE AWARE BUT DON’T LET IT CRIPPLE YOU!

43.) Each paragraph ratchets up tension

44.) Inhabit story – reader takes part in story

45.) Crisis is to Drama as Insight is to Memoir

46.) Narrative distance – description of time/space, both in the moment and reflective

47.) Dropped into a world that’s already spinning

48.) Things that generate the feeling are meditated upon

49.) Mask what you’re not good at – Veer toward your strengths

50.) Compressed amount of time

Which one(s) were your favorite(s)? Please comment. Don’t be shy. I don’t bite.

Rosemary Altea, author of the New York Times bestseller The Eagle and the Rose, world renowned spiritual medium, healer, teacher, and lecturer will present a fascinating Burlington Writers Workshop (BWW) Master Class from 1 – 3 PM on Saturday, May 23. In this BWW Master Class, Rosemary will ask you to identify some event from your past that was powerful and memorable – perhaps sad, painful, or even tragic. Then she’ll lead writers in a set of exercises in which they look at the same story from several seemingly opposing perspectives. You will also have an opportunity to directly participate

Source: Put Life and Heart into Your Characters: Rosemary Altea Master Class | May 23 – Burlington Writers Workshop

31.) Sensory details

32.) Specific concrete language replaces summary abstraction

33.) Try to describe how story works, what it does, and how it is rendered.

34.) ASSUME NOBODY CARES!

35.) Is the writer in full control of the language

36.) Where does it go off the rails?

37.) What different choices in craft to improve

38.) Moments in story

39.) Little things change it so much

40) What to leave in, what to take out.

To be continued…

21.) Narrator as observer

22.) Camera held by you v. camera is on her

23.) Show don’t tell with concrete detail

24.) Overview – summary – recounts but doesn’t recreate

25.) Tone – use of language and voice to vividly render world

26.) Must move toward point of story

27.) Representative setting and atmosphere

28.) Render situation vividly – the situation of the story and the purpose of writing it (Think editorially and critically.)

29.) Theme – what is the situation? what is the conflict?

30.) What engine drives the story?

To be continued…

11.) When?

12.) Where?

13.) Why?

14.) How?

15.) Need the ending to write the beginning

16.) Revise as you figure out what it is about and what is integral to the story

17.) Construct a version of yourself that will work for the story

18.) Associative aspect – more essay-like than story-like

19.) “Drama of Consciousness”

20.) Voice = percussion

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