by CWC Marin administrator | Apr 8, 2019 | Classes and Workshops, Events
Every author, or author-to-be—whether they write literary fiction, memoir, sci-fi, romance, poetry, or how-to—has heard about how valuable it is to build their “writer’s platform.” They spend tons of time, money, and energy gathering names for their email lists, beefing up their social media presence, and hiring publicists to help them secure interviews to promote their books.
But many authors forget that once they build that platform, somebody is going to have to stand on it…and speak…to people.
Join us on May 26 for Betsy Graziani Fasbinder’s presentation: “Public Speaking Skills for Today’s Writers — Pitfalls to Avoid, Practices that Pay Off.”
She’ll help prepare you to stand on your own writer’s platform with the skills and confidence you need to represent your book, your stories, and your ideas with passion, energy, and impact. With a few simple skills to help manage your nerves (or even serious fear) and some easy-to-use tools and techniques, you can engage audiences of any size.
Marin County author of From Page to Stage: Inspiration, Tools, and Public Speaking Tips for Writers, Betsy is a professional speaker and speaking coach. She’s also author of a novel, Fire & Water, and a memoir, Filling Her Shoes.
Whether you’re pitching an agent at a writers’ conference, launching your bouncing baby book at a bookstore event, or speaking to an interviewer on a radio broadcast, these skills are for every writer.
by CWC Marin administrator | Apr 8, 2019 | Classes and Workshops, Events
The Annual Conference on Creative Writing at Pacific is an extraordinary 3 day conference held at the UOP (University of the Pacific) in Stockton for both fiction and non-fiction writers alike. This year’s conference will be held on May 17 – 19.
Interested in pitching your work? All attendees may pitch to literary agents and publishers on site.
Like contests? Check out their contest for Best Unpublished Novel.
You enjoy options and like to choose from a wide array of knowledgeable speakers? Whether you are into fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism or are eager to learn more about publishing and marketing your work, this Conference pools together a large host of speakers from which to choose. The array of talent is truly outstanding.
The current speaker list and conference schedule are in process, but we can reveal that Catriona McPherson is one of the keynote speakers.
Catriona was born in Scotland and lived there until 2010, before immigrating to California. A former academic linguist, she is now a full-time fiction writer, the multi- award-winning and best-selling author of the Dandy Gilver detective stories, set in Scotland in the 1920s. She also writes a strand of award-winning contemporary standalone novels including Edgar-finalist The Day She Died and Mary Higgins Clark finalists The Child Garden and Quiet Neighbors.
CWC members may attend all three days for only $120, regular price is $240. Ignore the “any two people” on the registration form, we have arranged for you to be able to obtain this fantastic discount on your own — just mention CWC Marin. But please, invite your friends. This is an amazing opportunity. I’ve attended twice — it was fun, I had lots of choices for each time slot, and it’s an amazing value.
To register or find out more, go to writersconferenceatpacific.com.
by CWC Marin administrator | Mar 31, 2019 | Classes and Workshops, Craft, Events, Member News
[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.
by CWC Marin administrator | Mar 15, 2019 | Classes and Workshops, Craft, Events, interview
A Conversation with Author, Coach, Editor, and Teacher C.S. Lakin
C.S. Lakin is an author, coach, editor, teacher, and more, and on March 24, she’ll be presenting “10 Key Scenes That Frame Up Your Novel” at Book Passage, a workshop for the California Writers Club Marin. (Find out more and register at cwcmarin.com.)
Earlier this week, I spoke with her on the phone — she lives in Morgan Hill — to learn more her about her writing and her workshops.
When she answered the phone, she said, “This is Susanne.”
Q: I assume Susanne is the “S” in C.S. How did you come to be called C.S. when you so enthusiastically call yourself “Susanne.”
I started writing fantasy and used a pen name because many fantasy fans are male and most of my protagonists are male. I wonder if J.K. Rowling would have been as successful if she wrote under the name Joanne.
Q: My first question, well, my second one now, is about you — your journey to becoming a writer, editor, teacher. How did you come to focus on structure?
First of all, I’m very excited about doing this workshop. I look forward to meeting you all.
I’ve been writing for 30 years — it took me 23 years to get my first book contract. As for what got me started, well, I always loved editing. When I started doing that professionally, about 14 years ago, I got all riled up because I had clients who wanted me to polish their novels, but so many of them were structured poorly. The premises didn’t hold up. The characters didn’t ring true. All those important foundational elements were subpar. I was being asked to put frosting on a bad cake.
I began focusing on critiquing — not line editing. I’m interested in story. Novels have an expected structure, very much based on five turning points. Most writers know them intuitively, but they don’t necessarily think about them.
I encourage writers to take a different approach — what I call a layering method. We start with your first ten important scenes, then layer in the next ten.
Q: Can you give a sneak preview of one of the ten scenes you’ll be talking about?
Most writers know you have five turning points — an inciting incident, midpoint, dark night of the soul, climax, resolution. We’re going beyond that.
Michael Hauge, a Hollywood story consultant, says that modern stories are simple: they’re about one character pursuing a short-term goal. Every movie and every book has this same basic structure. You start with the setup, and then you go to your inciting incident, which triggers the story, moves the character out of what they were doing. If it’s a mystery, that’s when the dead body shows up.
Unfortunately, all too often, beginning writers spend half the book doing backstory.
Q: How do writers harness the formula without making it too formulaic? We’ve all read books or watched movies where the formula is too obvious.
People love formula. If you write Harlequin romances, there’s a strict formula. The danger is trying to be too original and rejecting the formula. Readers expect structure. They get antsy if it’s not there. They know intuitively there should be an inciting incident early on.
I used to buck the whole idea of structure. I wanted to be original. I didn’t understand structure is not only necessary but desirable. Think about a building. If you follow engineering principles — foundation, shear walls, and so on, you can create a basic structure that could turn into a fancy house, a restaurant, a museum. How you style it is what makes them different. But they all have that solid foundation.
Screenwriting is extremely precise — if you’re writing a two-hour movie, it’s 120 pages. A page a minute. When you turn to page 60, the midpoint must be there. When we watch movies, we’re so trained, we expect the midpoint right at that moment.
I’ve become a firm believer in structure after critiquing hundreds of novels.
Q: What are you writing these days?
I’m writing a sci-fi thriller called Lightning Man, so I’ve been reading and diagramming books. Best sellers.
I wrote a summary of each of six books, mapped out each scene. Across the top, I wrote scene 1, scene 2, scene 3, and so on. And then a scene synopsis for each book. I could see that what happened in all six books was the same. Usually, the first scene was high action that highlighted the protagonist, showcased their skills, abilities. Then the next scene something happened that changed everything, kicked us into the story.
The twist in Lightning Man is that the protagonist, who has been struck by lightning many times, has suffered memory loss, and he doesn’t know, until the end, that early in his life, he killed his 9-year-old brother while out on a boat. He thinks he’s an only child. He is angry at his parents for splitting up, but he doesn’t understand why. Meanwhile, I’m dropping hints along the way that tell another story. Other people know about what happened with his brother, but he doesn’t. Until he does.
Q: One last question. You’ve written dozens of books. You’re a writing coach and editor and blogger. You teach workshops. When do you sleep?
I sleep plenty. I also write fast. A lot of times I’ll write a novel in two or three months. I pick up an index card and write the scene. That’s because I’ve already mapped out the structure.
As important as structure is, I would add that there are two equally important things you need. One is an amazing concept. Something unique. If I tell you my elevator pitch, you should say “wow.”
I recently wrote a dark comedy The Menopause Murders. The protagonist is a woman suffering from menopause, and when she kills people, it relieves her symptoms. Her husband is the lead detective assigned to catch The Tacoma Terror. That’s a wow premise. He knows it’s her. She knows he knows. It’s a comedy. I have a co-writer, a very funny man. The book has publication offers, and you can see a sneak peak at themenopausemurders.com.
The other thing you need is a twist. Something surprising at the end of the story.
Like The Sixth Sense. Like The Planet of the Apes, where Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty in the sand, and we learn that the planet of the apes is really Earth.
You want to have this I-didn’t-see-that-coming moment.
Q: Like Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent?
That’s exactly what I was thinking of. A great twist that’s at the heart of the book. Something that the reader does not suspect but almost seems inevitable once you see it.
Q: But how do you create that twist? I’m thinking about the novel I’ve just about finished, which has a strong premise, but no twist as dramatic as Presumed Innocent.
The trick is how can you make things seem different than they really are.
A great example is Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. The premise is that the parents have a young girl with leukemia, and they have another baby for only one reason — to be a donor for the older sister.
The story starts with the younger sister suing her parents. There’s a high-stakes legal battle. In the prologue, we’ve seen this younger sister, Anna, thinking about how she might kill her older sister. We think Anna hates her sister. The twist is that the older sister, fighting leukemia, has begged Anna, please kill me. But Anna doesn’t want to. The beginning is misleading, on purpose. You think the whole book through that she hates her sister, because she’s thinking about killing her at the beginning. But the author misleads the reader, so the twist is surprising. That’s what I’m aiming for in Lightning Man.
To fool your reader, you might make a list of things readers assume. What can you make readers think it’s true, when it’s not?
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[Register for “10 Key Scenes That Frame Up Your Novel” here.]
