3 Steps to Calculate Showing and Telling

April 22, 2013

Ron Seybold movies, non-fiction, scene, sequel, structure , Leave a comment

scene-structure bickhamA writing student of mine has asked more than once in class, “I am looking for a guideline on scene, to sequel, to narrative for my writing.” Whether it’s creative non-fiction (like a memoir), or a short story or even a novel, there are no magic formulas as in screenwriting. Writing movies can be as rigid as you’d like to follow, with expected major plot points coming at 30 pages, and again at 60. The whole thing needs to be written between 90 and 120 pages.

But if you’re working outside the realm of writing movies — and screenplays can be a powerful experience to teach story structure — you’ve got to decide for yourself what’s effective for these ratios. You have a key reader look at your mix for a chapter, or a workshop group. You read it aloud to yourself.

The mix? You can single-space it printed, then color-code with a highlighter. Blue for narrative — the telling or prelude or exposition. Yellow for dialogue and scene — where two or more people try to solve a problem, or a person struggles to accomplish a goal.

Then green for what Jack Bickham calls sequel. In his fine textbook Scene & Structure, Bickham describes sequel as the writing

…that begins for your viewpoint character the moment a scene ends. Just struck by a new, unanticipated but logical disaster, he is plunged into a period of sheer emotion, followed sooner or later by a period of thought — which sooner or later results in the formation of a new, goal-oriented decision, which in turn results in some action toward the new goal just selected.

Emotion to thought, then onward to new action. Bickham goes on to point out that once you have the action selected, you add a character or a force to oppose it. You get conflict. We crave conflict as readers. And so you’re now into the next scene. (It’s Chapter 7, Linking Your Scenes, in Bickham’s essential book.) More

Writing as Your Self Help

April 18, 2013

Ron Seybold community, memoir, workshop Leave a comment

One of my groups at the Writer’s Workshop builds memoirs, and its members have been hard at work being vulnerable, fierce and flawed while they tell stories about themselves. It’s a challenging assignment to use creative nonfiction to write a memoir — these stories usually have pain and loss to go along with lessons and laughter.

self-helpThis kind of writing can help you help yourself. Yes, self-help, that phrase that’s been denigrated since it first appeared well over a decade ago. Of course, you still see Self Help on the bookshelf signs at Barnes & Noble or our local Bookpeople. But for some of our writers, finding self-help practice inside of a memoir group has been surprising.

It’s surprising to me to think that writing about yourself would not be helpful — or even the most rewarding result of creating a memoir. One of my early Workshop students recently expressed a common feeling: Writing is Hard. As we shared about this on her Facebook feed, a friend noted that the therapy of writing is one of the biggest prizes to be earned from the effort.

Writing is ultimately therapeutic – getting it clear on paper means getting it celar in your head, which means getting it clear in your heart sometimes.

So working on memoir, or any heartfelt writing, has the potential to be much more than comparison of narration vs. scene, or how to construct an elegant transition, or how many of your paragraphs get to be one-sentence grafs. (Tip: if there’s more than one single-sentence graf on your manuscript page, you may be undercutting every one of them after the first one. Sports columnists rely hard on the single-sentence paragraph. Even the prize-winning ones.)

The connection: The sports columns are creative non-fiction, just like a memoir. But the subject of memoirs is yourself and your heart, where the battles are conflicts between friends and family — so we want to read about struggles overcome, not just gamesmanship. Memoir is writing that will become therapeutic with enough practice and honesty. Making a memoir can produce self-help, with a gentle group to spread courage.

Don’t call writing hard. Write it now.

March 5, 2013

Ron Seybold groups, inspiration, MFA, movies , , 1 Comment

OBrienWhen I watched the wonderful movie The Sessions, I saw the story of Mark O’Brien, a poet who contracted polio as a boy but kept on writing. Kept writing even though he’d lost the control of all of his muscles, except those in his face. He lived in an iron lung. He held a pencil with a fat eraser in his mouth, then tapped the keys on his typewriter, or later on, a keyboard on a computer, once those became popular in the 1980s.

Let My Words Touch You

No matter what’s happening in your writing, you and I don’t have that hurdle to overcome. O’Brien published many articles and essays – he worked as a journalist as well as a poet – and released three books of poetry. Watching this man write in The Sessions, I realized I would never be able to complain again about how hard it is to write.

Revision is another matter. I can’t even start to wonder how he managed that. But you won’t have your writing published without revising it. On the other hand, there’ll be no revising without the writing, simple first drafts.

So write now. Because you need to do it before something else might stop you.

Karen-Stolz-214x300

March 5 is the birthday of Karen Stolz. Or it would be, if she were still alive. She was a writing teacher of mine in the years when I just started to study fiction. Karen passed away in 2011 at age 54, felled by heart failure. She had a big heart, enough to embrace people new to writing or new to fiction. She taught a class at St. Edwards attended by my brother-in-law Billy, a bank robber, gambler and storyteller extraordinaire. Billy’s stories arrived at my house inside letters from prison to my wife. Karen called him a good writer.

Billy was writing because he had nothing but time. Karen wrote her bestselling novel in stories, The World of Pies, because it was her time to move up from her short stories. Those stories got her into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

She moved back to her hometown in Kansas after her son graduated high school, where she taught writing at Pittsburg State. Karen had published a second novel by then, Fanny and Sue, and was working on a third, looking for a publisher.

Like anybody taken early from life, she figured she had more time to write. But unlike many writers, she wrote sooner – while her son was still in school – rather than later, when she’d have more time.

It was a smart choice, and one we can make for ourselves, too. Even if your writing is only blog entries right now, or 20 minutes at a time in a workshop meeting, choose to do it now. Let your voice be heard and enjoyed by the world.

One conference qualifier: how many writers will pitch, attend and contend?

June 28, 2012

Ron Seybold agents, conference, contest, manuscript , Leave a comment

Up on the mailing list for the Writer’s League of Texas, a debate broke out over the price for the WLT Agents Conference here in Austin. One member and former director said WLT wasn’t priced to meet the economy’s downturn. Another former director disputed the additional message — that a $79 two-day conference in Denton, Texas next month was a better value and more affordable.

The WLT Agents conference was as inexpensive as $319 — so long as you paid for it seven months in advance (Nov. ’11) and you’re a member. One thing that would help: earlier commitments from attending agents, so you might see if there’s someone you want to pitch to before you register so early. (I know, people in hell want sno-cones, too.)

If you’re being thrifty, yes, the WLT Agents meeting is not $79. But that Denton conference looks like a different kind of meeting than the Agents conference, so I don’t believe these are really in competition. I’m not sure how a $79 conference could be the same kind of investment as $319 worth of speakers and agents. You could do both, really.

Budgeting for conferences can be tricky. There are good price points outside of the Agents conference. After attending WLT’s Agents meet one year, and then volunteering at another, I went to the San Francisco Writers Conference last February. Fine meeting, but priced right at the Agents. (Agent Laurie McLean was at both.) SFWC has a very deep list of speakers to go along with the agents attending. It’s a real publishing town there, a step beyond a writer’s hotbed. Here’s what I can testify: the organizers (Michael Larsen, Elizabeth Pomada) really reached out to make sure that out-of-town writers like me were welcomed. Even in a meeting that had more than 300 attendees.

See, that’s the other thing to consider while deciding about a conference, something even more important than price, at least to me. Consider the number of attendees the conference accepts.

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The Layover

May 9, 2012

Ron Seybold scene, short story , , , Leave a comment

Sylvia toweled off in the truck shop’s washroom. She looked in the metal mirror and despaired about diesel grime that still coated her sunburn. Her cell phone sitting next to the scratched sink chirped at her, carrying the voice of her boyfriend Redmund.

“Sylvie,” he said over the speakerphone. “Watcha doing now? Real quiet in there.”

“Washing up, okay? You try slugging a rig down I-80 for six hours after a thrown fan belt tossed you off schedule. I’m a whole day behind on my miles.” The damn carrier knew, of course. They tracked her through that phone like a pelican after mackerel. GPS, yeah — Giddyup, Push and Steer.

“Okay, okay. Why so touchy, Trucker Gal?”

“Thinking of what my mom said when I stopped in Fort Collins on Monday. Had my laundry and that dog Butch to drop off. Mom said I wouldn’t look white again if I sat in a tub of bleach.”

“The grime, huh? Important to see you clean and girly.”

“You don’t know, fella. Her part of Fort Collins is so upper crust even the maids are European. Trucker Gal troubles her. Like I’m slumming on those 18 wheels. Instead of trying to pay off the old man’s gambling debts.” Banging rattled the metal door of the washroom. “Gotta go. Some rig-monkey wants his turn.”

“Whoa. I don’t like the sound of that.”

“His turn to shower, nimrod. I got this handled.” She thumbed the disconnect and stepped into gray pants and the company orange shirt with the logo and her name on it.

At the bar she perched on a vinyl black stool with a back. The barman eyed her like they all did, first at her chest and then her nametag. “So Syl, what’ll it be?”

“You’re asking me about my drink?”

“What else?”

“I think we both know what else. But I just got cleaned up, so let’s stick to the liquor. Make mine a shot of that low-rent scotch.”

He left a glass of Peat Brothers on the formica bar-top and started pulling beers. The laughter from the sports trivia game that was mounted on the corner of the bar made the back of her neck tingle. Mom wouldn’t even be thinking of her daughter’s color, or being clean, here in Cheyenne. Sylvia sipped at the scotch and shivered.

“None too smooth, huh?” This was a different voice, low and slow behind her. She turned to see a black man, something that stood out in Wyoming like an elk with bells on his antlers.

“Not smooth, no.” There wasn’t a tub of bleach that would ever turn him white, either. They had that much in common already, at least for a night of her layover on I-80.

Polishing up a short-short story

May 9, 2012

Ron Seybold short story Leave a comment

I watched Melanie polish that band of silver every night, as faithfully as she took her birth control once we were parents. Her father’s MIA bracelet, stamped out in the ’80s and now older than our daughter, a co-ed prowling the job boards with a panther’s cunning. My father in law who I never met was less lucky. Mel’s story is that her dad fell into Cong hands in a province too remote for any exchange. On weekends she worries the Web like a squirrel collecting acorns, nuts of facts that shine up her story like she buffs that bracelet. She needs a hero that I can’t become, because I’m never going to be her father. I could use a hero too, but I didn’t lose my dad just months before I was born. Our friends all say that I’m lucky that way. But there’s no bracelet for me to wear, no auto-icebreaker that guarantees immediate compassion, love and acceptance.

Boundaries spark creativity

May 1, 2012

Ron Seybold groups, habits, inspire, submissions, teleplays-TV 1 Comment

It’s easy enough to revel in the first-draft mania of a writing project. This is important time, the period to clear your pipes and empty that tank of ideas and dreams. The genuine creation time, however, is when there’s a deadline and a word count or a page count to meet.

That’s what drives Saturday Night Live, according to its producer Lorne Michaels. He’s been interviewed on Alec Baldwin’s top-flight Here’s the Thing podcast. Michaels said that “I believe creativity doesn’t exist without boundaries.” For him there’s both a page count and a deadline. The show is ready by 11:30 Eastern Time — or as he puts it, “it’s not ready, but it’s got to go on the air at 11:30.” At some point, a piece of writing needs to meet a deadline to show to a writing group, an agent, a contest, or a lit mag’s submission date.

And SNL needs to unspool in 90 minutes total time — so plenty of it has to be dropped or shortened to meet time. Sometimes whole skits are dumped if they don’t work out during the frantic six days before airtime.

Boundaries exist to create choices, and some people believe that choices are all there is to define art. There’s a great scene in the movie Wonder Boys. Novelist Grady Tripp is slogging through his second book after a debut success. You see him creep into his study and take a page and feed it into a typewriter. He lines up the paper for a page number and types 261 — then looks around and adds a 4, for a 2,600-plus page manuscript. Later his grad student Hannah reads the wooly piece of writing and confronts him about it.

Hannah glances at the huge stack of paper sitting on her dresser, then, hesitantly, looks back to Grady.

					HANNAH GREEN
		It's just that, you know, I was thinking about 
		how, in class, you're always telling us '-that 
		writers make choices--at least the good ones. 
		And, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the 
		book isn't really great-I mean, really great-
		but at times it's, well, very detailed, you 
		know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses 
		and ail the dental records and so on-and I 
		don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it sort of 
		reads, in places, like, well, actually, like... 
			(with trepidation)
	...you didn't make any choices at all.

Let choices of page counts, deadlines and characters establish the boundaries that can spark great writing. And remember, sooner or later it’s 11:30, and time to finish the creation.

The Free Dictionary: page definition: a youth being trained for the medieval rank of knight and in the personal service of a knight. →

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