To learn, or not to learn, that is the question.

Some friends and I attended the Texas Writers Conference event on Monday night at Schreiner University.  The keynote speaker was Bret Anthony Johnston, who is from Corpus Christi but is currently the director of creative writing at Harvard University.  Bret read for us and took questions.  He was funny and charming and complimentary of the questioners.  I figured he had to be pretty damned smart to be teaching at Harvard.  I wasn't disappointed.

Bret's writing is character-centric, which now seems different to me than storyline-centric.  The action in his stories is inside the characters.  I think this might be the way to write the Great American Novel; I am still trying to write a story as good as Last of the Mohicans.

My question for you is, can creative writing be taught?  There are a lot of classes which offer this.   My friend Tom learns well by reading and in classroom settings.  I learn best by doing.  What about you?  Your comments are invited.

  Bret Anthony Johnston

The Tractor

I talked with my friend Robert Schwarz last night on the telephone.  He lives about as far out in the middle of nowhere as one can get these days and still be in the hill country.  He has written most of his two memoirs in a spiral notebook with a pencil on the hood of his old ranch truck in a pasture in that middle of nowhere.  He told me of a time he spent struggling with a paragraph, and when suddenly, there it was, clear as day, while he was baling hay, he stopped the tractor and wrote it down  with a pencil from the toolbox on a feed sack he was using as a seat cushion.  Here is an excerpt from "R L and Other Stories"

Tall at slightly over six feet; slender maybe 160 pounds, muscular with the long, thin untiring muscles of the fields and cedar brakes; sharp features; large intense brown eyes, short scissor cut brownish hair; smooth faced without even a hint of a beard; short upper body with long legs; floppy battered grey felt hat with a high crown and wide brim turned downward all around; work worn scarred calloused hands with long fingers liberally coated with the blackish tar like cedar resin; leathery skin - Ben was the archetypical cedarchopper.

Robert has been to a couple of Conference meetings, and one of these meetings we'll get in a discussion about writing.  For me, the Conference is about just that - talking about writing with other writers.

Talk up our short story contest, tell your friends about the Conference, and if you have a really good paragraph you would like to share, send it to me.  As always, your comments on this blog are invited.

Me?  I'm still trying to write a paragraph as good as Robert's.

Write or Die

 

 

We have at least 6 people interested in a version of Sit Down, Shut Up, and Write.  I'll go over this concept with the FWC Brain Trust and we'll set a meeting, as well as another Open Critique Group.

We are looking at September 18 or 25 for the next Conference meeting.  I am hoping to get Publisher and Editor Ken Esten Cook of the Fredericksburg Standard Radio Post as our speaker.  I messed up the planning for that, we did the Shameless Self Promotion Workshop with Eva Pohler instead, but I forgot to announce that and tell the speaker it wasn't happening.  Eva put everything she told us about promoting our work in an ebook.  If you couldn't make the class, buy the ebook and take notes as you go. 

There is a good blog on writing by a sassy and irreverent Canadian at http://bareknucklewriter.com/  "I like to have the grunt writing work done before noon, pouring out all the novel stuff in a caffeine-fueled rush like a hail of word-bullets."  She recommends downloading http://writeordie.com/ and setting it to kamikaze mode, which deletes words if you don't keep typing.

You might wonder what Fredericksburg Writers Conference is all about.  Here you go:

Support and encourage writers of all kinds by:

- quarterly meetings with interesting speakers.

- building relationships through critique groups and other meetings.

- holding an annual agent and editor conference just like the big guys .

- holding seminars on related skills (as in the recent promotion seminar, in which we net $250 towards that goal).

I believe we are finding a core group of writers to build this program around.  The way it works so far is that Mara Fox Moretti has the ideas, and I know how to make them happen.

Shameless Self Promotion

Fredericksburg Writers Conference Workshop
No one noticed!  You have an awesome book or idea or business, and NO ONE KNOWS!  You're on Facebook, you've put an ad in the paper, you've sent an email to all your contacts, and you have 1 sale (your mother?)  If you have a book to promote or a business or an idea, but not a lot of money, this workshop is designed for you.

Dr. Eva Pohler has a day job as a professor of writing and English at the University of Texas in San Antonio, but she is also a wildly successful indie writer.  She didn't find this success by accident, but after a steep learning curve in generating publicity and readership for her Gatekeeper series of young adult novels.  Writing a great book is just the beginning; getting readers is a bigger challenge.

The Fredericksburg Writers Conference has heard presentations by Dr. Pohler twice in our year plus of existence, and it was clear that her strategies take much longer than an hour to lay out.  Because we found such value in her advice for self published writers, we have set up a workshop:

Saturday, June 28th, 2014.  Holy Ghost Lutheran Church Fellowship Hall (across from courthouse)

8:30 AM: Register/Coffee and Pastries/Introductions

 Creating Brand Awareness

 Using Social Media

 Soliciting Reviews

 Make Amazon Work for You

 Form Alliances/Box Lunch

 Format Your Book to Sell

1:30 PM:  Go home and get to work!

 

The fee is $60 including lunch.  This is our first attempt at a project like this, so we don't know what we are doing, but if anything, this is underpriced and it will be worth your time.

 

Robert Deming 830-992-5676 rcdeming@gmail.com

Mara Fox Moretti