The Blackwing was first crafted in the  1930s, and is now revived. You can get yours — wow, $1.67 a pencil — at jetpens.com. Come see how this No. 1 writes at the Workshop!

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.)

Blue. Yellow. Green. Highlight and spread out your pages on the floor or a table. Look at your balance. It could be one third each, over the length of the book. But in some places you need heavy narrative. Be aware it doesn’t engage our emotions. In other spots, like key turning points, you’ll want beefy sequel. We go inside the character’s head in real-time, not earlier, so this gives us meaning of what we’ve been shown in scene.

Uh oh. As an artist (all writers are artists) you get to decide. Art is nothing but choices, but you get to experiment. As in revisions, based on the colors you see and the response you get from readers.

In a session at a Writer’s Workshop group, we responded to writing that first promised and then delivered. A scene’s setting suggested the details that the story returned to later. The writing was not a long passage, but it managed to return to a subject so smoothly as to remind me of Scene and Sequel. They’re a pair used (often exclusively) in modern novels to give structure and pace to stories.

Every reader or moviegoer understands scenes. But a story needs more than just scenes; they’re good enough for movies, but writing demands some deeper thought in the characters, emotional revelations, internal monologue. These things make books so rich that movies struggle to deliver the same impact. As good as Lonesome Dove was as a miniseries, it’s hard to find a Larry McMurtry fan who loved the film as much as the novel which sparked it.

Sequel is the engine to deliver that emotional wallop, the glue “that holds scenes together and helps you get from one to the next,” says Jack Bickham in Scene & Structure:

“Sequel is a flexible structural component, and it provides you with all the tools you need for in-depth characterization, analysis of motivation, explanation of character planning, etc.”

After the trouble (the scene of conflict) that is essential to any interesting story, there are four compartments in the sequel that will lead to the next bit of trouble:

1. Emotion
2. Thought
3. Decision
4. Action

A scene is characterized by conflict. A sequel is characterized by feeling and logic. Bickham notes:

“Little about the sequel structure is hard-and-fast, except that the sequence of the parts must always be imagined by the writer in the order which human behavior dictates – emotion first, then later thought, then the reaching of a decision, then a new, goal-oriented action.

This 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.

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.

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.

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.

The SF writer’s conference has sold out often, which means they’ve got a cap on the number of writers who try to talk with agents, or attend speaker sessions. Just last year there was an MS contest for the WLT show. While dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was a first-round reader for the Austin Writer’s League contest. Too soon, there were 400-plus entries, and the submitted pages limit shrank from 30 to 10. Pretty tough to get a good first chapter offered on 10 pages, unless your metier is thrillers. Perhaps that’s why the WLT MS contest was eliminated: too much participation.

The Agents meeting in Austin is still pretty special, although there were just as many in SF (and some overlap). Travel to Denton in July, or SF in February? Or if living in Austin, just drive down to the meeting each day? Decisions, decisions. With a full MS ready to pitch, WLT is still a premier place to go. My workshop writer Elizabeth Buhmann earned a “send me a full MS” request from Ms. McLean at WLT last weekend. Is that worth $319? How much do you want to invest in meeting with the prospective partners in your publishing career? (That’s what an agent really is, considering they get 15 percent of your royalties and advance.)

You can get training and advice, but that instruction is sometimes at a different price than a conference packed with agents.

“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.

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. →

Rinzler has a website which includes links to a weekly column he writes. This week there’s an interview up there he did with four agents out of this business that he’s known since the 1960s. It won’t surprise you to learn these agents still have a lot of faith in big-house book deals. After all, the alternative for most of them is littler-house deals (rare is the advance there, so the agent’s payday on those deals is far away.) One agent said her agency is supporting self-published writers now. This is what I mean when I say that agents are today’s editors. I don’t know how many self-published writers are being supported by that agency. As many as the agency needs to stay in business, I’m sure. Some agencies have a stable of editors on call, freelancers. And book designers. And marketing and distribution experts.

(What’s that, you don’t know any of these? You will if you self-publish. Yes, I edit books. You always need an outside editor, which is why I hired one for my novel Viral Times.)

Rinzler took comments on his article and like a good blogger, commented on those posted. One commenter said you want to be careful who you engage as an agent once you get turned down by the biggest names. Rinzler has good advice on how to proceed in these middling waters — a backwater, by the way, where you can still get a full year older while your book remains agented, but unsold.

I agree that a recommendation from another writer or the agent’s track record are the best ways to evaluate an agent’s legitimacy and potential for success. And whereas I haven’t come across very many charlatans or freaks, there are, as you say, less experienced agents. They may be just starting out or entering the profession as former editors, publicists, marketers, refugees from the music or film business or even lawyers with experience handling intellectual property. These individuals may actually have more time to spend, may be hungrier and eager to sell.

Ways to judge whether or not to take a chance with them: See if they’re easily accessible, and respond to email or phone calls. Meet in person or via Skype or on the phone, and give them a clear schedule of your expectations. Structure a deal that requires documentation that your book has been sent to acquisitions editors within 30 days. If you haven’t received any offers to publish within six months, part company and seek elsewhere.

The part of his advice I like the best is his guideline of six months to get an offer. (You have to add this to the 3-6 months it might take you to get read by an agent, then read in full with your complete book.) Hungry agents will be okay with “after six months you lose my book” terms. The big-house ones, who have established writers to continue to represent, won’t.

I have 10 guidelines I like to have a contest meet. You can score your contest prospects along these marks. It’s really hard to get a 10. And you will want to submit in a passionate way to overlook the entry fee, the Number 1 guideline below. It’s your tuition, after all — you learn something from everything you do to support your writing. My guidelines:

1. I like an entry fee of under $20. Anything higher feels like fundraising to me.

2. I like a contest that completes and will anoint a winner in less than six months. Three is better. Life is short. Just decide, already.

3. I like a contest where I have a good idea of the number of first-round judges, and who they are. Otherwise, it’s usually grad students who volunteer. Not to be dismissive of less-practiced writers, but I never was crazy about 24-year-olds judging my stories.

4. I like a contest where I don’t have to be someplace to receive the prize. Travel costs money too, and I want to use my money for book research trips.

5. I like a contest with a cash prize, not a book contract. Publication in a lit journal Of Note might be worthwhile, too. If your goal of entering a contest is to get your writing noticed.

6. I like a contest where there’s some limit to the number of entries; this can be hard to determine. Why wallow in a field of 10,000 entries? Even a 1 percent chance of winning  would need 10 winners.

7. I like a contest that’s focused on the kind of book I am sending. Fantasies about Moldovia shouldn’t be alongside a novel about murder in New England, if you ask me. Or at the least, have some categories to cover subject matter.

8. I like a contest with a reputation, if possible. There’s accountability to the writers to be impartial, and that’s not automatic

9. I like an application I can complete in under 10 minutes. Again, life is short, and doing an app is writing. Online forms = much better.

10. I like a contest run by a publication. They seem to know how to handle things for the writer who’s as much genre as literary.

Just as example, Ploughshares has opened its annual writing contest for emerging writers. It meets some of the above criteria, but it’s got some issues.

1. You need to register in a database to enter — not a show-stopper, but time-consuming
2. It’s not going to publish the winners until a year from now.
3. You don’t know much about the judging, but it’s Ploughshares. They have established lit journal credibility.
4. It’s lacking focus on entries. Fiction. Non-fiction. Poetry. That’s it.
5. The limit on entries is based on a two-month window of submission time. There will be thousands in this contest.

I would have entered Ploughshares’ contest awhile back. But Viral Times, my first novel, is now in print. I’m not emerging any more, not in the way they describe.

There’s pretty good contest advice from Poets & Writers: It has a searchable database and a great blog on contests and grants

Best wishes in your submitting. This can be a good and important step to publishing — get it out there, within your budget and time limits.

Wikipedia: is the largest nonprofit literary organization in the United States serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. →