Creating a Fictional World

A novelist must create characters, as well as a plot that moves the story forward, but all of this must exist within a fictional world. How do writers create such a world?  Most writing teachers tell their students to write what they know. My great teacher Albert Guerard, who taught at Harvard for twenty years and then at Stanford for twenty more years, told his students something quite different: Write what you can imagine. This was hugely freeing to his students and to me. A writer did not have to write about his or her own life, which might be small and uninteresting. In fact, the whole world is open to a novelist. Imagination is everything.

Whodunit? Whydunit? Wheredunit? This workshop will explore the internal machinations of the mystery novel and how to pick up the reader’s pulse. Our focus will be on the fundamentals: outlining, plotting and character development—as well as how to create a suffocating sense of suspense that compels one to keep turning the page, chapter after chapter, until the very end. 

This Workshop is designed to engage participants with contemporary poets and the different strategies to generate new work.  While the focus is on African American poets, a range of poets will be under review.

The Workshop will be in two parts:

#1.  Participants will look at poems in the packet and discuss the work of those poets with whom they are unfamiliar.

#2.  We will use vocabulary from two or three of the poems to generate new work.

We will use two or three poems as catalyst for new works. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Gregory Pardlo, Ada Limón, Lorenzo Thomas, Angela Jackson, Marilyn Chin, Maureen Owen, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Renato Rosaldo, Brenda Hillman, Latasha N. Diggs, Peter Covino, Joy Harjo, Major Jackson, and Charif Shanahan may be part of the packet.

 Participants must be prepared to read and write, write and write.

At the end of this workshop, it is my hope that participants will have created poems that they feel good about and have learned about.

Have an opportunity to meet for 10 minutes with agents, editors, and publishers. Sign up information will be available soon.

WHAT:   Pitchapalooza is American Idol for writers (only kinder and gentler). Twenty authors will be selected at random to pitch their book. Each writer gets one minute—and only one minute! Dozens of writers have gone from talented amateurs to professionally published authors as a result of participating in Pitchapalooza, including Genn Albin, our KC winner who got a 3-book mid-6 figure deal with Farrar Straus & Giroux.  

HOW: At Pitchapalooza, judges will help you improve your pitch, not tell you how bad it is. Judges critique everything from idea to style to potential in the marketplace and much, much more. Authors come away with concrete advice as well as a greater understanding of the ins and outs of the publishing industry. Whether potential authors pitch themselves, or simply listen to trained professionals critique each presentation, Pitchapalooza is educational and entertaining for one and all. From Miami to Portland, from LA to NYC, and many stops along the way, Pitchapaloozas have consistently drawn standing-room-only crowds, press and blog coverage, and the kind of bookstore buzz reserved for celebrity authors.

PRIZE: At the end of Pitchapalooza, the judges will pick a winner. The winner receives an introduction to an agent or publisher appropriate for his/her book.

Genre fantasy is very different from science fiction, much less well understood, and possessed of its own set of pitfalls for the unwary writer. This workshop will help you to avoid those pitfalls. Going back to the basics of world-building, you will learn to shape your fantasy world into something that both convinces and makes sense, while still retaining the magic that drew you to it in the first place. Exotic and richly detailed though your fantasy world may be, it is still ruled by the basics of narrative. Luckily, those basics are simple and easily mastered, leaving you free to exercise your imagination to the limit.

Given how much commerce and communication take place online, now, an online presence is vital to any author. This session will outline some of the common modes of online presence, and give participants an opportunity to consider what kind of presence they wish—or have the energy!—to maintain. After that, the presenter will demonstrate how to create two basic types of website (blog-oriented and static) using a free Wordpress account, and briefly show a few other tools that can be used, such as Twitter and Weebly. There will be a hands-on segment of the workshop, to allow participants to work on creating or editing their own sites, so please bring your laptops or tablets!

Really! It's not hard! Learn the basics of playwriting through a streamlined process that allows you to create a brand new play in only 90 minutes! We'll create characters, stories, settings, conflicts and give you some new tools to take home.

We have brought our stories to the page. Now… how do we bring it to the stage? The big screen? Our workshop will explore how fiction makes the leap to film/television and find ways to adapt our own material for new mediums. By taking an in-depth look at previously adapted pieces and comparing the source material with their evolutionary counterparts, we will discuss what makes its way onto film and what should remain on the page—and how.

What is a character driven story? How do you create a character powerful enough to drive a plot? This one hour craft talk and discussion goes beyond the lists of facts to offer a method for creating a dynamic character.

It's the greatest time in history to be a writer. There are more ways now to get published now than ever before. Yes, there are so many options, but they're all so confusing. This interactive seminar will break down the process of getting published by Big Five publishers like HarperCollins, Penguin, Random House, etc. You’ll get the skinny on landing a book deal with a well-respected independent publisher like Gray Wolf, Tin House, or Soft Skull. And finally, you’ll get the inside 411 on self-publishing. Then three writers will be chosen to pitch their books in ONE MINUTE. The Book Doctors will break down (in a kind and gentle manner) the strengths and weaknesses of the pitch itself, and suggest whether the author should try Traditional, Independent, or Self Publishing.

Novelist William Dean Howells proclaimed that the writer born Samuel Langhorne Clemens was “the Lincoln of our literature.” Ernest Hemingway certainly viewed Mark Twain as a liberating force, famously stating that “all American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” And comedian-activist Dick Gregory said that Twain was “was so far ahead of his time that he shouldn't even be talked about on the same day as other people.” Think of the benefits of knowing this literary master’s secrets? But in fact, Twain kept no secrets when it came to the writing process. He was extremely generous with his thoughts on style, literary habits, and the writer’s role in society. Indeed, Twain constantly was writing about writing. Mark Dawidziak, the author or editor of five Twain-centric books, including Mark My Words: Mark Twain On Writing, will talk about how Twain’s lively advice can help guide and inspire writers more than 108 years after his death.

“Writing,” as the saying goes, “is revision.” This workshop will discuss many approaches to editing and revision, and how to engage with the revision process in a way that is as inspired as the initial, generative stages of your writing. We’ll look at before-and-after examples of radically revised published works. In-class exercises will be geared towards employing new editorial and revisionary devices for both micro and macro aspects of a work-in-progress. We will also discuss the process of working with editors at literary magazines and publishing houses.  

“You draw your metaphors from whatever parts of the world you know,” Jane Hirshfield writes. In this way, metaphors are a product of proximity; we make use of what’s within our reach. But distance plays into metaphor in other ways, too. When comparing one thing with another, how far can the imagination stretch? How does the writer calibrate that distance correctly? Together, we’ll look at a range of examples from different writers to better understand how metaphors map onto the page. This will equip us to develop more effective and imaginative metaphors in our own work, the kind that grab editors’ attention.

The Artist as Activist

Artists today are grappling with their place in the current social and political landscape: when is art activism and when is it escapism?  The fact is, as artists, we can take the risks that politicians won’t. Moreover, art can often reach people in ways that politics can't.  As E. M. Forster once said, “Fiction is truer than history because it goes beyond the evidence.”  That’s true of a lot of art, because a lot of art is about something that a lot of politics is not: empathy.  In this keynote, Bohjalian will discuss how he has used fiction to address issues as diverse as genocide, domestic violence, and teen homelessness.

You have your first or two down and you know what story you want to tell, but your plot isn’t working yet. The session offers an explanation and examples of necessary plot points that will make your story click into place. Craft talk and exercises.

How do you write opinion pieces effectively, whether for print, broadcast, or the web? Veteran TV critic David Bianculli has some opinions on the subject – and will share them, while also having attendees write instant short mini-reactions of their own to material shown in the seminar. Then those reviews will be reviewed, and so it goes…

Have an opportunity to meet for 10 minutes with agents, editors, and publishers. Sign up information will be available soon.

Enjoy an engaging presentation from a panel of publishers on options for publishing your work over lunch. Panel participants will be announced soon.

Chris Bohjalian says that his fiction has changed enormously in the digital age -- and it has changed for a variety of reasons.  But the big one?  The spectacular renaissance in TV and Film.  The Sopranos.  Breaking Bad.  Fargo.  Sociologists and anthropologists have chronicled the way our attention spans have changed, but so have our expectations of narrative: Bohjalian believes that even literary fiction must begin with a bang (at least a metaphoric one).  And so in this workshop, he will explore with the writers how to begin a novel or a short story -- and how to hook your readers from the first page.

In this workshop, we'll delve into the personal essay form, examining what makes a strong and marketable piece. Drawing on one's own personal experience for writing material offers up unique opportunities as well as a number of pitfalls. Here, we'll look at writers who have used the "I" in a variety of ways to deepen their work and connect with readers. We'll also uncover some of the common pitfalls of the genre, and touch on the basics of the personal essay market as well as what to know before you publish.

Attendees will be expected to read two essays (to be emailed beforehand) in preparation for the class. Attendees should also come prepared with a short (2-3 pages) personal essay (or start to an essay) that we will discuss during the session.

If your life is central to your story, but you’re unsure whether the material makes more sense to craft as a memoir or as a roman-a-clef, this workshop is for you.  We’ll discuss some key differences between the genres, especially in terms of voice and structure.

In this workshop we’ll look at some exemplary scenes from celebrated memoirs with an aim to learn more about how writers process memory through narrative. Recalling an event or memory is one thing, yet to transform it into active scene and to do so with style and measured self-awareness is the task of the memoirist. We’ll analyze the distance between the memoirist’s narrative perspective and the events they depict, and assess the advantages and disadvantages of writing our stories from a first person, nonfiction perspective. The workshop will engage participants in several exercises based on the texts we discuss.