Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Lessons Learned and the Exploratory Writing Workshop

Yesterday was working on the firewood and my model airplanes. Linda called me for the Monday Night Football game. Green Bay lost to their arch rivals the Bears. Darn!

We unloaded a trailer in the wood shed and I split half a trailer load out on the landing. I also cleaned up along the property line where there was plenty of debris from splitting in previous years. They did a survey in selling the land to the north of me and to my surprise I picked up 35 feet more than I thought I had. That was a pleasant surprise, not that it really changes anything.

I worked on Zoom-Zoom. That repair was major and took a lot of effort. Like anything else I do for the first time the initial iteration is time consuming learning how to solve a myriad of problems and acquire new skills. It’s like learning to write a novel.

Since this is a writing site, I need to write more about writing. I have mentioned in the past that in the military I learned there were three levels of war and it dawned on me several years ago that the same analogy holds through for writing.

There is tactical writing that is the ability to simply write a chapter-sized piece of between 1000 and 3000 words. How well you do this is a measure of your mastery of an important aspect of the craft and shows both a writer’s talent and mastery of technical skills.

Then there is the next level which is the stringing together of chapter sized chunks. At this level a writer’s mind is too saturated by the scope of the endeavor to suspend all those balls in the working memory of their CPU. This requires an outline so the task can be managed in bite sized chunks.

Finally these chapters bring us to the third or what I call the Strategic Level. This is where the writer goes into each chapter in the outline and insures that all the components of good writing are included and distributed in some sort of a reasonable manner. Components include Backstory, a Life Changing Event, foreshadowing, dialog, momentum, character development and a host of others that are discussed in my on line class at New Horizon’s Academy at WDC called The Exploratory Writing Workshop.

This class is an attempt to get writers to think consciously about what these three levels require, how to get a story idea into an outline and making sure the outline has all the good stuff that has historically worked for writers.

Perhaps I am trying to do too much in a class of only eight weeks and the pace is often too fast for the students to manage. Most don’t complete the workshop and those that do often take it two or more times. Now that we are between terms I want to rework some of the material to bring the Workshop up to date with the lessons learned. Wish me luck.