by CWC Marin administrator | Nov 2, 2015 | Events
[Summary of CWC-Marin Presentation — October 26, 2015]
How to Survive NaNoWriMo
Last Sunday’s “Calling All Writers” event at Book Passage provided two useful tools for writers, established and novice alike. The first hour focused on “How to Survive NaNoWriMo” — that’s National Novel Writing Month, which starts November 1 and challenges participants to write 50,000 words by 11:59 PM on November 30. The second hour covered how to turn those words into gold with the help of a critique group.
Think of NaNoWriMo as AA for writers, suggested the workshop leader, CWC-Marin board member Kasey Arnold-Ince — it provides daily support, accountability, a specific commitment of 30 days. Each day in November, after their writing stint, participants upload their working document to the website, which tallies the word count, and records it on their profile. There are also online forums and AA meetings — sorry, write-ins, in locations across the globe. (Even a few in Marin.) Though NaNoWriMo was created for novels, crafty non-fiction writers can also get in on the act by using the online website and app to develop their non-fiction. The algorithm that counts your words doesn’t care if it’s counting fiction or nonfiction.
NaNoWriMo is not a critique tool and no one will actually read or critique your work unless you choose to share some of it by adjusting the settings in your profile.
NaNoWriMo has led to success for writers — Water for Elephants and The Night Circus were both started at NaNoWriMo.
Here are some tips that Kasey shared:
- Get an early jump start — prepare your outline and organize your source materials before November 1, so you have a map to follow once the clock starts ticking.
- Try frontloading the month by doing more writing early, so when the hectic Thanksgiving week comes, you can adjust your pace accordingly.
- Take care of yourself — make time for sleep, breaks, stretches, and exercise.
Nonfiction is typically two to three times faster to write than fiction, because you don’t necessarily have the plot issues, character development snafus that plague the fiction writer. Nonfiction writers are often expert in their field and can draw on their experience.
Kasey compared NaNoWriMo to a writing experience in high school where her English teacher gave students the apparently Herculean task of writing a hundred poems in a month, and regularly checked on her students’ progress. While the poems in the first week weren’t so great, she recalled, they served the purpose of “purging” sentimental, clichéd, and overly emotional poems, creating breathing space for better poems to be written in the later weeks.
Build Your Own Writing Group by Victoria Hudson
Victoria Hudson, author of No Red Pen — Writers, Writing Groups & Critique, led the second hour discussing how to create a successful writing group. Here are some her tips:
- Watch the tone of the group — keep it positive, not snarky
- No competitiveness
- Have an agreed-upon structure and rules, including details like whether to use to the comments/review function in Microsoft Word.
- Group should be no larger than 4-5 people
- Give each person 20 minutes to receive and respond to feedback.
- Agree on the word count maximum for each submission as opposed to the number of pages, which can vary depending on how you format.
- Ideally submit work to each other about one week ahead of time, so time during the meeting is not wasted on reading.
- Mary Webb, a well known writer and instructor has a 3-stage method:
- Repeat the best “nuggets’ the writer has come up with – hearing them repeated will help the writer develop their voice
- Author is silent for a period while feedback is given
- Author then asks questions about the work and feedback to find out what didn’t work
- Avoid the following words and terminology:
- “-isms” – e.g. sexism, fascism
- “trite”
- “stereotypical”
- “I didn’t like it”
- “I loved it”
- Keep advice specific — rather than criticize something as sexist, you might explain that you feel that a female character who is an uneducated housewife with no ambitions beyond pleasing her husband does not reflect the experience of the vast majority of contemporary women.
- Advice about comments:
- Give the good stuff first
- Be specific – e.g. say “this is how I felt when X happened to the character.”
- Don’t ask if the content is true.
- Be encouraging.
- How to deal with conflict within the group:
- Have a comprehensive set of rules in place so people know what to expect, like how many warnings about rule violations will be given before someone is asked to leave the group
- What should be critiqued?
- Focus on literary elements such as tone, theme, character development, transitions, verb tense agreements.
- Don’t devote too much time to typos, spelling and minor grammar errors. Focus on the story.
- Last but not least, use a green or blue pen – not red!
- How do I deal with fear of rejection and criticism from other group members
- Remember that fear is your friend, telling you to pay attention.
- How do I find a writers group?
- Check out local libraries — Mill Valley Library has a drop-in salon
- Attend local writers’ events such as those hosted at Book Passages in Corte Madera
- Find a meetup group
by CWC Marin administrator | Oct 21, 2015 | Events
Shameless Self-Promotion or Selfless Promotion of Others?
One benefit of being a California Writers Club member is, or should be, an opportunity to get more readers for whatever you’re writing. But many of us are uncomfortable promoting ourselves. So let’s promote each other.
Are you an author who’d like to be interviewed and featured on this website, Facebook, and elsewhere?
Are you a writer who’d like to interview a fellow CWC-Marin member?
Contact John Byrne Barry — I’ll play matchmaker, connect an interviewer with an interviewee. See the interview with Club president Joan Steidinger as an example.
Meeting Notes
Since we can’t always make it to the monthly meeting, we thought it would be useful to capture the essence of the presentations for those who weren’t there. Here’s the summary of David Corbett’s excellent workshop on character that Laura Lopez and I put together from our notes. We’d love to be able to do that for every workshop, but we need some member-writers to agree in advance to take notes and then distill them for posting here on our blog. Might that writer be you? Contact John Byrne Barry or share your idea in the comment area below. We’ll spread it out so each of us only has to do it now and then. And if you want, we’ll team you up with someone.
October Opening Act:
Pitching Your Project
Most CWC-Marin meetings feature a presentation where one or several people is in the front of the room, and the rest of us are in the audience. But this year, at 1 pm, before the 2 pm formal meeting, we’ve been hosting “Opening Acts,” geared toward getting to know each other and sharing our work or ideas.
Earlier this year, the Club held an Open Mike, where participants got ten minutes to give a short reading and solicit feedback. Another time, we read the first page of the book or story we were working on.
Before our October presentation on NaNoWriMo and Critique Groups, we’ll be pitching our projects, completed or imagined, in a minute or less, and giving feedback to each other.
Have an idea for an Opening Act? Contact John Byrne Barry or share your idea in the comment area below.
John Byrne Barry is author of Wasted, a” green noir” mystery set in the Berkeley recycling world, and Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, a political thriller set in New Mexico during the 2008 presidential campaign.
by CWC Marin administrator | Oct 2, 2015 | Craft, Events
David Corbett, Author of The Art of Character
Our speaker for the September 27 CWC-Marin meeting, David Corbett, was late, very late actually, but he then more than made up for it with his insightful and stimulating presentation on creating memorable characters.
Corbett, a former private investigator and author of six crime novels, including Mercy of the Night, wrote a highly acclaimed primer called The Art of Character two years ago, and ran down the highlights for the CWC members and guests.
He focused on five key components of character: desire, adjustments, vulnerability, secrets, and contradictions.
“You want to keep torturing your protagonist. Things are bad? Make them worse.”
1. Desire
“Stories without desire are stillborn,” he said. It is desire, Corbett says, that drives story even more than conflict. Desire leads to conflict. Someone wants something, but they can’t get it. Someone or something is in the way.
The best characters yearn deeply for something, whether it’s Ahab’s white whale or Gatsby’s Daisy. It’s what we can’t get, but we can’t stop wanting. And if the character stops pursuing their desire, then they have to live with what they didn’t do.
Usually characters start with a lack. They’re not living the life they want to live.
Why? Four possible reasons:
- Weakness — laziness, cowardice, shyness, lack of confidence
- Wound — some incident in the past that hold them back
- Limitation — youth, inexperience, gender, class, poverty
- Flaw — moral failure, greed, cruelty, dishonesty
Many characters turn themselves inside out trying to protect themselves from pain.
While Corbett said that mapping these reasons for thwarted desire are helpful, it’s best to show them in scene, whether you include that scene in your final draft or not.
Opportunity or misfortune strikes. Desire arises.
2. Adjustments — How We Cope With not Getting What We Want
Denial is the great wall between what we want and where we are. It’s pretty common to pretend that desire isn’t that important.
Of course, adjusting can be a mature response. Sublimating your desire so you can achieve long-term goals. LIke students who study instead of skiing in order to get into medical school. They don’t deny the yearning as much as put it off.
3. Vulnerability
As readers, sometimes we’re turned off by neediness, but usually when people are vulnerable, when we see the hurt from not getting what they want, we are attracted to them. If they’re never vulnerable, why would we care about them?
Vulnerability can manifest in a variety of ways — existential, physical, emotional. One common situation is when characters do something, knowing they will be judged.
In Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is vulnerable because she has no home, and, barely under the surface, she is asking her sister, is this my home?
4. Secrets — the Bigger, the Better
The minute you give your characters a secret, you create an illusion of depth. The best secrets are those that, if revealed, will change the person’s life.
5. Contradictions — Acting Out of Character
No one acts the same way all the time. They may act out of character in times of stress, or because of some wound in the past.
When someone acts out of character, it shakes up our expectations. Creates intrigue. Like the take-charge supermom, who goes out on a date and we see her tentative, deferential, uncertain. We are all many things to many people. We act differently in the boardroom than in the bedroom.
Writers often put their characters in situations that take them out of their comfort zone, where they become more unpredictable. A shy young man goes off to war. An impatient woman is confronted with a husband getting dementia.
Some other questions to consider? When did your character exhibit courage? How about fear? When does your character feel shame, feel like he or she is a bad person, a loser? Maybe losing a job. Getting divorced.
And then there’s the opposite of that. The moment of triumph. Pride.
Two other dichotomies Corbett called out were guilt and forgiveness — some people never forget — and death/loss and love/connection.
One theme he kept returning to was the idea that you want to keep making life more difficult for your characters. How they respond to these troubles shows us who they are.
“You want to keep torturing your protagonist,” he said. “Things are bad? Make them worse.”
“At some point,” he said, “characters have stopped believing in the promise of life. It’s that wound that you lick for the rest of your life that defines character. “
At their lowest point, when they have to change or die, sometimes literally — that’s where discovery comes.
“Until then,” Corbett says, “flog them like a mule.
— by John Byrne Barry, author of Bones in the Wash and Wasted, and Laura Lopez, author of Escape the Will-Power Trap: 7 Secrets to Doubling Your Energy & Getting Your Life Back.
