Well, I took great care to put all the files I needed to do floggings while away to do the workshops at the South Coast Writers Conference on a flash drive—and then left it sticking in the computer. Argh.
This morning I’d doing a marathon 6-hour writing-intensive workshop called Sharpen Your Storytelling Skills. What do you think of it?
First exercise: I give the students a scenario—a place and two brief character studies. They write two “experiential” descriptions of the place from within each character’s point of view. The goal is to make all of the narrative in a story contribute to the characterizations of the people in it.
Second: I’ll give a brief description of a character and the class writes four different ways to describe a point-of-view character. The goal is to avoid POV-breaking descriptions such as “She brushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes.”
Third: I’m going to solicit snippets of dialogue from the class. They’ll write them down, and then use a scene and two characters I provide to write a scene that uses dialogue beats to characterize and advance the story.
Fourth: we’ll tackle “telling” and “showing” by taking a brief scenario and writing first a “telling” version and a “showing” version.
Fifth: a brief foray into adverbs, exploring how to get rid of them when they hook up with a verb by finding a better verb, and then how to apply them to adjectives to achieve nuance in description.
Sixth is writing a killer first page. The class will be asked to write the first page of a story, about 200 words or so. I’ll give them a scenario to use, or they can work on something of their own.
The class will, of course, be reading what they write out loud for critique by me and the other class members.
I think this will work. We’ll see.
Ray