Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Finding the Thread and the Characters

Finding the Thread and the Characters

I am sure that most realize that it is next to impossible to write a longer work without an outline. The problem with this is that most people hate outlines and I think the reason they do centers upon the eternal question… “How do you outline something you don’t have a clear mental picture of?”

This is a valid concern. Many people, once they start writing, are more or less locked into the very fuzzy plan they had to start with. Let’s say you have a vague idea for a story and you force yourself to do an outline and write half dozen chapters and decide you don’t like it? This has happened to me in building street rods…. I get halfway through and discover I don’t like the car enough to finish it. It seemed like a good project to start with but the further along I got the more I realized it wasn’t turning out the way I expected…. That the fuzziness when it began to dissipate, and coalesce into something finite was not what my imagination had it cracked up to be.

The same is true in my writing and I realized the need for more structure but how does one go about structuring something that is amorphous to begin with? Anyway the Exploratory Writing Workshop evolved as a consequence of my frustration and determination to find a better way.

Why not write a half dozen vignettes and then try and pull the thread of the story out the backside rather than trying to push the thread of the noodle (story line) from a standing start? So, with a lot of help from Karen we developed the class. Yesterday as I began to shadow write my vignette to lesson one it occurred to me that there was still some explaining to do. That’s OK, in a regular classroom that’s where the teacher steps in and explains things and answers questions. In an online course it isn’t quite so easy…. In an E-course the instructor has to anticipate more.

What I need to do, is a better job explaining how the pulling of the story line thread is going to happen. In order to explain this I need to tell the students that these six vignettes do not need to be sequential. In other words they do not need to be in direct sequence as in chapters one through six. The student needs to expand their minds starting from a page with chapter one through thirty listed and take the thoughts for whatever vignette comes to mind and put it into a context somewhere along that continuum. It might well be that the six vignettes belong in chapters 1, 7, 11, 19, 23 and 30. I realized this after I wrote my instructor sample of lesson 1.

I will mention this before I open lesson two next week. There are some real advantages to taking a course you teach along with the students the first time around. The danger, in my case, is they will realize their teacher is not that much further advanced than they are or worse….I won’t say it….