June 23, 2019

Slice of PIE: Missing Blog Entries…SORRY!


NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

No rant today, just an apology for my irregular posting lately.

Summer School started last week, and I teach a class called Writing To Get Published. I’ve done this between one and four weeks a year for the past twenty-two years.

In the class, many of the kids WANT to be there. They WANT to write. Many of them are talented, though many are not – like my own, the group’s “great writing” is patchy.

The thing is that during that week, I have the kids experiment with writing poetry, “Weekly World News” articles (aa fun way to practice journalism-style writing), personal essays and How-To pieces, interview and turning the resulting “mess” into an article, and how to generate ideas. On Wednesdays, we “finally” reach fiction. Most of them are confident here, because it’s this particular kind of writing that allows their imaginations to soar – and not bother to follow any rules or format.

Sometimes, they soar too far into the realm of reality to the one of, “I already know how to do this! Nothin’ Guy can teach me!”

That’s when I do something their teachers rarely (if ever) do: I slap them down.

Kindly.

But they get slapped down nonetheless, making me a sort of editor who writes a brief (real) note explaining that the story I’ve subbed “has some good things in it, particularly…but overall, it’s not for us. I look forward to your next.”

I tell that to the kids up front, explaining that the purpose of my class isn’t to do an assignment, it’s to prepare at least ONE PIECE by the end of the week to submit to a real market. To real editors who have no reason to be nice to them.

At any rate, I ALWAYS have a student who is “working on a book”. What that usually means is that they’ve written an extremely short story – and divided it into number “chapters”. I redirect them to flash fiction and short stories.

I’d love to do some sort of intensive writer’s workshop, but we’ve tried before and usually can’t get more than five to seven kids. Which means that I teach the class for a cash loss, so they don’t run it. I’ve tried running it in conjunction with the first class, but that doesn’t let me give them the editing and critiquing time they deserve.

After fiction, I talk about flash (which is how I broke into ANALOG, writing a “Probability Zero” piece), Twitter Fiction ( http://nanoism.net/about/, which I also managed to break into a couple years ago), and Five Minute Mysteries (mysteries constitute 12% of adult fiction). They have fun with that and there’s a MASSIVE outpouring of “pieces”. Most don’t really meet the criteria of having a beginning-middle-end, but they do have fun. Moving on to dialogue, I turn them to script-writing for a skit and a commercial. After they print the manuscripts, I have them hand them to me, and scramble them and assign them to other groups. I also explain that what they find incredibly hilarious hasn’t been translated to the script – and that if this is what they want to do, they need to provide direction for the actors.

After that, they get to work on whatever writing they want to – after a couple of lectures on writer’s block (which I don’t believe in) and rejection – and share that some of the most famous writers spent many years in obscurity and that before they “were an overnight success”, they wrote pages and pages of stories that will never be published. Some they know – like JK Rowling and Dr. Seuss; others not so much like Louis L’Amour whose westerns were a staple of many readers for nearly three-quarters of a century, but who was rejected hundreds of times before he became the novelist he was when he passed away.

The class was great (I’ve taught, WTGP for 22 years, and a Serious Writer’s Workshop I did for 7 years), but it drained my writing energy from writing to editing. And there you go, that’s the WHY; the when is for the next 5 weeks. So, my production will likely remain jerky for a while longer.

Later!


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