On April 28, we will hold a problem-solving session where you can get feedback on your toughest writing challenge. People will take turns, and we’ll keep it moving so everybody gets a chance.
You’ll discover two things: You’re not alone in the challenges you face, and your fellow writers have a lot of good ideas for you.
Here’s a note from Carole Bumpus, CWC Nor-Cal Co-Chair and State Board Rep:
The Bay Area Book Festival, May 4 and 5 in Berkeley, is seeking volunteers. Sign up by contacting Carole Bumpus at carole.bumpus@yahoo.com.
[Note: This event has been rescheduled from April 3 in Berkeley to June 5 in Oakland.]
On June 5 at 6 pm, I’ll be leading a two-hour workshop for the California Writers Club in Berkeley — Setting That Works: How Memorable Setting Can Advance Plot, Reveal Character, Echo Theme, and More. We’ll be gathering at WeWork, 1111 Broadway, Oakland. (If you were at the CWC Marin meeting this past November, you saw an earlier version of this workshop.)
We all know that the primary job of setting — in fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction — is to immerse readers in the scene. So they can visualize it, feel it, smell it.
But the most memorable and effective setting is more than a pretty, or gritty description. It’s lean and strong because it’s working hard. Doing two or more jobs. Not just showing the reader where the story is taking place, but also advancing your plot, unifying various elements of your story, revealing character, echoing theme, setting mood, and more.
In this hands-on workshop, we will review the different ways setting can strengthen your story, and do several writing exercise putting what we learned into action.
One of the most common jobs of setting is defining, revealing, or changing character. For example, in Larry McMurtry’s western, Lonesome Dove, the characters are so defined by the setting, they almost couldn’t exist elsewhere.
The story follows two retired Texas Rangers and their fellow cowboys as they drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana, facing bandits, Indians, disease, and the harshness of the landscape. The challenges of the Old West breed a certain kind of character — a loner, macho, self-reliant, independent.
You can read about the other jobs that setting can do in Setting That Works: How Memorable Setting Can Advance Plot, Reveal Character, Echo Theme, and More.
Sign up here.
CWC Marin member Valerie Saul passes along this local event in April, featuring three young Stanford authors who have published acclaimed works of young adult fiction — Rebecca Hanover, author of The Similars , Ama O Lieb, author of the Phoebe Pope series, and Rahul Kanakia, author of Enter Title Here.
More here.
We had the pleasure last Sunday to participate in C.S. Lakin’s workshop — “10 Key Scenes to Frame Up Your Novel.” She not only helped me strengthen my novel’s structure, she was lively and entertaining too. It was especially fun to see movie clips that demonstrated the placement of key scenes. (Now, in addition to reworking my book, I have a list of movies to watch.)
Thanks to all who participated and made it such a stimulating afternoon.
Below are five key takeaways. Why five? Well, one of the takeaways from the workshop was benefit of using round numbers.
1. Your protagonist needs a goal and if he or she doesn’t have one, you’re in trouble. The goal can evolve over the course of the book, but you have to have one.
One example she referenced was McFarland USA, based on a true story of a cross country team from a poor, primarily Latino high school, in California’s Central Valley. At the beginning of the book, the goal of the team’s coach, Jim White, played by Kevin Costner, was to coach at a prestigious school. But by the end, when his McFarland team has won the state championship, he turns down an offer to coach in Palo Alto. His goal evolved, but he had one from the beginning.
2. The advantage of mapping out these 10 key scenes is that they are the most important to making the story work — they are the big rocks that you need to put in place first.
She told one of my favorite stories, but one I’d heard in relation to time management and priority setting, not novel writing. Here’s my version of that story:
A teacher takes out a clear jar and pours a pitcher of rocks into it. To the top. She asks the students, “Is it full?” They say yes. Then she takes another pitcher, full of pebbles, and empties it into the jar. The pebbles settle into the spaces around the rocks. When she asks again if the jar is full, this time the students say no. Then she pours in a pitcher of sand, and then water.
“What is the lesson here,” she asks? The students raise their hands enthusiastically and when she calls on one, he says, “it mean that when you think your life is full, that there’s still more room.”
She says, “No, it means that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in.”
Same is true for writing a novel. The big rocks are these 10 key scenes.
3. Key Scene #1 (Setup) introduces your protagonist and shows him or her engaged in their “normal” life, the life that is about to change as a result of Key Scene #2 (Inciting Incident), which disturbs the protagonist’s path and starts him or her on a new journey.
4. While novels are more flexible than screenplays, you still want your midpoint to come as close to the middle as you can. The midpoint is where the protagonist is balancing on the knife’s edge. Once he or she commits, there’s no going back.
The movie clip she showed to illustrate this was from Casablanca, where Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, changes from the selfish, bitter bar owner, who’s been a bystander as the war takes its toll on others. Ilsa comes to the bar and Rick is drunk and he treats her poorly, reminding her that she abandoned him in Paris. Ilsa, in tears, pleads with him to understand, telling him that she left because she had learned her husband, Victor, was still alive.
This is the point where Rick decides not to be a bystander any longer, to take a side, to help Ilsa and Victor.
At the midpoint, the character is forced to look within and ask the hard questions, like “What am I doing?” or “How do I go on from here?”
5. If you want to do a twist that will surprise the reader, but not make them angry, you have to set it up early in the book. You have to lead readers to believe in a certainty when it’s not the case. You can make a list of things you want the reader to assume and place misdirection accordingly.
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Bonus Takeaway: Movies I either need to watch to study scene structure: Truman Show, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Shawshank Redemption, Nell, McFarland USA, Ever After, Strictly Ballroom. Did I miss any?
Here are the slides from her presentation. Click on the image for the pdf. (Note: the movie clips were removed, since they did not translate to the pdf. And they made the file too big to upload.)
You can find more excellent resources at livewritethrive.com.
