Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

More on the Genesis of the Exploratory Writing Workshor

More on the Genesis of the Exploratory Writing Workshop

Today I woke up one big hive ball. I am taking Benadryl but the itching drives me crazy. I used to have these spells in the military but this is the first one in a long time. Mine are allergy induced, usually from something I ate or wore. Oh well, I get them, they linger and after a while they go away.

Often when I write a contest entry I let it cool overnight and post it the next day. I write fast and can knock a 3K vignette out in one sitting. If I let it sit until the deadline, that is what it does…SIT. So I usually post early. I like to have it out there where people can read and review. However, it’s more than that. I find myself reading my submissions after they are posted like a reader instead of a writer. I like the material I produce and when I read it on the contest forum, I keep picking up glitches that hick-up, the flow. Often these hick-ups don’t count for much in themselves but collectively they create stones in the road to easy reading. Sometimes it’s the overuse of modifiers, sometimes imperfect word choice and often it’s a plain case of having a poorly written sentence.

Now that my contest is roughed out, I find myself going back and reading over it. As I do there is plenty to tweak just as there is in a contest submission. Fortunately, since I had some “High Speed” help from Karen I finished the roughing out phase earlier than expected and will start going back through it and setting the house in order.

This undertaking really expanded as I started to write. The idea was to teach how to do developmental work before embarking on a larger work. This of, course, means writing an outline. The question thus becomes, how does one write an outline when the story line is an amorphous and elusive thread. Trying to push that thread forward is much more difficult than pulling it backward. So the reasoning went why not write some serial pieces and do a little exploration of the characters and the story line and see what the heck was going to rear its head. While many have difficulty writing a novel most writers can manage a short story and what is a short story but a shorter version of a novel?

CLANG! Off goes the OOGA horn! The differences are huge. For one thing you can juggle the components of a short story around in your mind if you have a talent for that sort of thing. But you can’t say the same for a novel. It is just too broad in scope. Your bio-processor is soon overwhelmed and even if you get to the end you probably outran the efficiency of your brain to do a quality job. This brings us back to the basic question, how do you write an outline if you don’t know the story line? (Hold that Thought.)

In her book , "The Art and Craft of Storytelling" Nancy Lamb refers to the concept of "Play It Where it Lays." She says, " Make a few notes about your characters and scenes." Then go for it. She goes on to caution that "Winging It." is even for experienced writers an approach fraught with danger. There are however benefits, one of which is spontaneity. This is what we are doing in the workshop. Its like having your cake and eating it too. We will do much more that she advocates above and still keep the benefits of a well defined structure

The Outline allows you to work in bite sized chunks and write these well. You go and write one baby step at a time. I suppose you could just push on through a writing and then come back and do a cleanup edit. However, this is not such a good idea because when you get to the end you are burned out on the story. We don't want to still be facing a massive rewrite that become more confusing the longer you work. When you get to the end, you want it to be the end. Not that there isn’t a whole lot of editing that lies ahead but this is tactical or what I call sentence editing. It isn’t chapter editing which I call operational editing. Another point I might add is that if you tie your racehorse of a Muse to the manure wagon you will go out to the barn one morning and find her gone.

The Exploratory Writing Workshop is a pretty cool approach. Each week you write a vignette for a contest and just focus on that. A vignette is a piece of tactical writing and you can relax and enjoy writing. You simply go where the flow takes you writing. After you have the six vignettes written, you pull out the thread of a story line and insert The Life Changing event, Dramatic Premise, Themes, Dramatic Ingredients, devices and Character sketches. With this outline in hand you are now postured to begin to do some serious writing. You can focus on those little chunks of tactical writing and the Operational and Strategic aspects will have taken care of themselves. When you get to the “THE END” that is where you wind up. Sure there is still some tactical cleanup and this can be extensive but it is sentence level sweat work, which is much easier to manage.