Now that I’m home and recovering, I’m better able to rub two brain cells together to produce a coherent thought.
When I was preparing for my teaching gig at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, I thought about the writers who’d been the guest instructors when I was a student and what they did. Not only had they all been established authors for years and years — nay, decades. They’d been teaching writing for that long. They had established and well-practiced lectures, exercises, and techniques.
I couldn’t do that. I just don’t have the experience. So my plan was to rant about my experiences and the advice and discoveries that had helped me, and turn the lectures into discussions, asking lots of questions and seeing what happened. It seemed to work. And I discovered that while I don’t have loads of experience, I have memory: I’m new enough to all this that I remember very well what it’s like to struggle to get published, to struggle with plot and pacing, to just, you know, struggle. That’s recent history for me. I don’t have so much experience and miles under my belt that my years as a newbie are distant memory. That memory is something I think instructors with decades of experience no longer have. I hope I never forget what it was like to be new.
My lecture topics at Odyssey (If some of these look familiar, it’s because some of my Genreality posts over the last couple of months were dry runs.):
Monday: Novels v. short stories. Manipulating story length and why you want to. I hear so many writers say things like, “My natural length is long/short, I only write novels/short stories.” I think they just haven’t practiced any other form, and that to take advantage of opportunities a writer needs to be able to write at any length. We did some exercises on what it would take to turn a short story into a novel, and how to pull short story ideas out of a novel.
Tuesday: Suspense, pacing, and the release of information. I showed the opening hook from the first season Medium episode “Penny For Your Thoughts,” which is a wonderful, suspenseful clip. I also talked a lot about Quentin Tarantino’s work, since I think he’s a master at pacing. What this all comes down to: What do you tell the reader? When do you tell it to get the effect that you’re looking for? Also, what does false suspense look like? When does withholding information create frustration rather than suspense?
Wednesday: Plot, action, and character, and how they work together. This is my current pet rant. I talked about how a lot of times plots don’t work because we don’t believe the characters, and how plot needs to grow out of the characters’ actions. This story is happening to these people because it could happen to no one else.
Thursday: Revising, and taking a stand in your fiction. In workshops like this, students do a lot of critiquing of each other’s manuscripts, with the understanding that they’ll go back and revise them, and make them better. But there’s amazingly little information out there on just how to do that. So I talked about that, along with the idea that strong stories actually mean something. My prime example is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which on the surface is a centuries-spanning war story. But it also has a strong anti-war message. Revision is the time to figure out what your story actually means, what the theme is, and how to make that stronger.
Friday: The Business and its Psychology. Rather than talking about stuff like manuscript format and query letters, because the workshop’s last week is set up to teach all that, I talked about the psychology: how to set up concrete, attainable goals and why it’s important to do so; dealing with jealousy and depression; establishing realistic expectations, etc. Basically, it all boils down to two things: What you can control, and what you can’t. I talked about how to spend your time dealing with things you can control and less time worrying about things you can’t.
