Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Evolution

Evolution

As I teach the course, the Exploratory Writing Workshop, it raises as many questions as it answers. For sure writing a novel is an exercise of considerable complexity and in order to deal with it you need either a very powerful mind or a very organized mind, not to mention reams of imagination.

As a building block, I ask the students to write a series of vignettes to see if they can get a handle on their story and characters. So it is not surprising that I see them hard at work on these two aspects. Concurrently I am shadow taking the course as they do and working on the same lessons and objectives.

With regard to some of the objectives in the Lessons I have to smile. I am reminded of a Vignette in a class while teaching at Fort Leavenworth. The class was asked to read it and write a problem statement. Without exception every student always selected something different from the vignette to point to as the problem and there-in revealed a problem that had huge implications in War Planning.

So I wrote a little synopsis and asked the same sort of question….Well the same thing is happened when I ask who the Central Character is, what the Life Changing event is what is the dramatic premise, what are the themes and all the strategic components to writing that we are talking about. At the end of the course I will have to maybe provide a vignette as a final and see if they understand better how to identify these in larger work.

What I see coming… (I can already hear Karen groaning) is a course called, “Son of Exploratory Writing.” In this course we will talk in lesson 1 about creating a story world….In lesson 2 Expand that into a Back Story, in lesson 3 extracting the thread of a story line, lesson 4 writing an outline, lesson 5 a synopsis, lesson 6 a vignette, lesson 7 a chapter and lesson 8 stringing the chapters together into a novel.

In this course the lessons will be aimed at tactical and operational writing and the current EWW will focus more on the Strategic. Maybe even make the EWW into three parts, tactical, operational and strategic writing and how this developmental work goes into writing a novel. Just thinking out loud but what is wrong with that?