writing the longer I've been a writer the more I've realized that it's it shares more in common with things like baseball than I thought it did a baseball player can can read all about the philosophy of the baseball of of you know how to how to hit a ball right and read all about that knows what muscles he has to Train to get better at that but in the moment he's not thinking about a lot of that in the moment he's swinging and it connects and his instincts make him do that writing is actually a lot more like that than you think the point of practicing one of the points of practicing is to train yourself to be able to get into that zone to learn instinctively what's working and what's not working and this is gonna sound annoying to you because it's not sort of stuff I can teach I can teach all that all the stuff about what muscles to work and different things like that and I can give you lots of cool tools but at the end of the day you've got to figure out how to get into that kind of that moment where it's all clicking for you and working in ways you don't even know why where your unconscious is working everything is bringing the story together and you've got to learn to do that and that is why the practice is so important another metaphor I like to use and this works very well if you were to go and listen to two pianists playing in a concert hall and one had been practicing the piano for two years and one had been practicing for 20 years and we threw out the occasional really odd super savant you would be able to tell very quickly which was which the person has been going for two years is probably still capable they're not doing awful stuff but you will listen you can be migraine this is the person who's been doing this for two years this is the maestro readers and editors in specific can read a page and have that same experience they will know and will know just by reading which is which which is why there's can reject the book so quickly a lot and what you're doing in this class being a writer which you're not learning to write the perfect novel you are learning to become a writer which is kind of a performance art that when you sit down to type you perform well and those chapters come across well and then you have this piece of fiction that you can work with and make better and take and get to this level that when someone sits down to read it it has an emotional and powerful impact on them Wadler reading and they want to keep reading they may not know why but they want to keep breathing and that's what you're shooting for that's what you're learning can do okay so you are going to build good habits part of the requirement for the word count limit in this class the 30,000 words are we're gonna have you do is that's gonna make you write every week you can't do 30,000 words in one week I can't do 30 I could be very good I've never done 50,000 in one week which is why that's but you know 30,000 is a fairly regular week for me so but you're probably not going to be doing that hopefully you're going to be looking at doing you know two to four thousand words a week would be my goal for you in this class and if you're doing that across 14 weeks you will be done you'll be way done well we don't really have 14 weeks left right so if we look at it at 10 as 10 weeks you'll still be able to get there so 3,000 words a week set your goal for 3,000 words a week find and riding-habit that it works for you don't fall behind okay because if you fall behind you do it all in the last month you're really kind of undermined the whole point of doing this right maybe you'll find out your avenge writer and that's good for you but try it this way and try to do your 3,000 words a week you're going to submit to your writing group 1,000 words of it that does mean you're not going to submit your whole story to your writing group but it's okay you could you don't have to submit the words you wrote that week like if you the first week right 3,000 words that's three weeks of submissions to your writing group or if you write 3,000 words and you submit that you realize this just isn't working on a jump to another viewpoint you go ahead submit that thousand words and that viewpoint or things like that use the writing group and we'll talk later today before we split about how to use a writing group and why writing groups are effective and how they can ruin your story learn good habits alright this is this is gold number one learn good habits number two is is learn your writing style I should probably write these better learn your style okay learn your style there's many ways to write a good book as there are writers and what's a good book for me may not be a good book for you sometimes you will pick up books in the bookstores that are selling well you will look at this and say this is utter crap why it was this published why are people reading this it's not a vote for you it's okay it's okay for books not to be for everybody thanks some of the things you write won't before your writing her we're gonna try and learn to get good criticism even on something that is not necessarily targeted right at us that's okay some of the things I'll tell you to try out in this class will not work for you for instance if you are really a binge writer then this whole slow and steady thing may not be in the way that you approach a book and it may just be something you try for this semester you say no I've been high I was having more success taking you know the summers and writing a book during the summers and binging on it and then editing and doing ready groups with it the other eight months of the year that's okay but couldn't the goal is for you to try these things out to learn your writing style to figure it out then a lot of the stuff that writers will give you as advice is actually advice of something to try out not advice of something do a good example of this when I usually like used in the first week of my class is the difference between the Gardeners and the architects how many have heard me talk about this before a few of you have because you take the class too often or you watch things but that's a bet so writers tend to fall on a continuum between what George RR Martin's likes to call the gardener and the architect we also I used to use the phrases discovery writer another good one and outliner I don't like discovery and outliner as much as I once did because any any writing process there's going to be discovery and when you're outlining you know sometimes it dredges up and images from your childhood at high school which may not have been that long ago for some of you but you know it's not like it's heading a sub paragraph B you know bullet point three word I mean that's not what we talk about when we talk about mountain liner an outline is really a planner and the discovery writers it is a seat-of-the-pants er as one of my friends likes to call it and writers tend to fall on this continuum somewhere you should try out both both methods are good a discovered writer and in Assam is Stephen King isn't every writer sitting King says for him to start a book he needs interesting characters in an interesting situation and then he writes the seats where it goes that's fun for him that's productive for him whereas strict outliners and such as Kevin J Anderson Kevin creates a very detailed outline of a paragraph by paragraph explanation where each paragraph is basically a chapter for himself and for the publisher and then he takes that paragraph and he reads it again and he writes the chapter according to what that paragraph says to do is a very strict outliner eats everything down on the Paige before even starts writing the book who knows exactly where things are going you are probably in between here somewhere and beyond that in a given book you will slide back and forth depending on how that book is going and what works for you at that specific book and in this class one of the your goals should be all these things I talked about saying okay I'm gonna try to everybody discovered writing and I'm gonna I'm gonna write a scene with no planning at all I'm just gonna go into it the characters here's the situation let's see what happens tool and see if that creates fiction that you enjoy that you had a good experience doing it that you're proud of when you're done and it helps you continue forward we're all looking for stuff that helps you continue forward next time you will try outlining you'll say okay what's going to happen in this chapter what's our kind of climax in the chapter what's our rising and falling action of the scene what are the comic books for addressing and how is this part of our our greater outline how are we moving toward you know what's our goal for the book and how are we moving toward it in this specific um in this specific chapter and you'll write that chapter with everything planned out ahead of time and you'll see if that works for you try different things find out where you are I am actually right around here on this for almost all of my books what this means for me is I tend to do a lot of outlining for my world building I like a really spectacular setting it's very interesting I love to have all these things seated in it and I'd like to have a pretty good plot outline before I start so I want to know where I'm going I don't know where I'm going in a story usually this story turns out poorly for me I've got to have a goal in mind I've gotta have something to shoot for and so I will build myself in that way and we'll have an entire lecture on how to how I build an outline so don't worry about that but I will build myself an outline and I from it but I discovery write my characters I will cast different personalities in this role I write a few scenes when I won't know my characters until I write them and after I know who they are I have to go back and revise my outline I mean right along for a while and say this person this character is developing into won't do what's in the outline I either need to pull that character out and try something else there or I need to advise the outline depending on what I think is gonna make a better story and that's how I build a novel Dan Wells is more over here he's not a huge easy he's a pretty big discovery writer but he has found that having a last chapter in mind before he starts discovered writing thinks has so many problems with his voice and that ancient like just the step over this way where now he likes to not never start a book without at least having in his mind or even a rough draft written of the last chapter and then he can discover granny's way there but if he knows where he's going it'll be better these are just things that you'll become aware of as you practice you'll learn the discovery writers tend to have weak endings but strong characters and you'll learn that outlining tends to create really explosive plots but sometimes characters the field wouldn't that they're just following you know steps along the path that's been set out for them and you'll try maybe to find some balance in between it'll help you do the best of both worlds I do have a friend Caitlin who is one of the most discovery of discovery writers I know and what she will do is her first draft is for outline she will write beginning to end a first draft with without any planning then she will sit down and say okay I will use this to make my outline and I'll write the book over from scratch starting on page one now knowing all the important beats of the of the book ahead of time and knowing where I'm going create some fantastic books for a discovery writer where normally she has trouble with plotting and things like that this helps out so you'll find different processes to work on to help you become a better right so you're gonna learn your style hopefully I'm gonna throw a lot of tools action and you're going to practice using them alright thank you very much what else we gonna do in this class we are gonna practice the Predators nice one give him good start right yours it's important but it's not the most important thing in the class I like the writing groups it makes my workload for a given weight more manageable it allows me to meet with you guys it one-on-one in some courses that I've done I did as a student you know we have these big 15 or 20 person you know sessions where you submit a story and everyone talks about it and I felt like those really ground into a useless place very quickly because you know a few people would say the important things and then everyone else will just like start making quite a sentences or what life so I like splitting into smaller writers how what what numbers did you write are you're not writing groups how many people were in them they're four or five so we have six reading groups thank you is that right good that's a that's a good numbers I can see in your writing group with you four or five of you and I will meet with your writing twice in that case and if I don't get to you twice because of the being on tour I'll have to look at the numbers I may want to take one of those writing groups and break it apart and and make us into five writing groups instead just so I can make sure I can get to each of you twice with the tour coming up next month things are going to be just tad tight for me all of my March Naples open the February is going to be going to be pretty tight so we'll look at that at the break and we might take one group and break it apart and put one person each into the other groups yeah do ranking groups meet today we'll talk about that yeah okay my goal is to have you meet today but I don't expect you to admit it much if anything at all really today is just that we're going to make sure that everything's working and whatnot so ready groups let's talk about redditors I promised you I would and now is the time yeah we may go extra long in the lecture today because I skipped the lecture last week and I want you guys to get your money's worth more in many cases your parents money's worth or an education to government's money where a good writing group is wonderful thing for a lot of writers and a terrible thing for some writers even a good one a bad writing group is a bad thing for all writers so let's talk about how to do it well the idea is for you to learn how to give and receive criticism in a way that improves your writing because having a good support structure it can really help you keep these good habits some of you may have found in taking creative writing classes already that submitting stuff to a creative writing class every week keeps you writing and gives you a deadline and that's good for some writers other times when you don't have the class you don't have that impulse to submit if you have a writing group that you have formed you don't have to keep the one in this class but you know you can practice in this class and learn how to make one then you have a deadline every week you have a piece to submit and you'd better get it done otherwise everyone's gonna make fun of you which was my solemn duty in the writing group that was never late I was always late so I found that my writing group has helped me and elevated me as a writer all through my career it helps me find some of the things in the writing that I need to work on but it also has given me that support structure it's no coincidence that three of the members of my writing group the founding members professional writers that's that happens junior Tolkien and she has Louis Werner enemies together when a writing group really takes off they lift each other up giving to other opportunities and we start finding more success you get to see people being successful my reading of Dan wells Dan wells and I took this class along with a woman named Caitlin's Oh Belle who are the three writers in that class and Peter who became a professional editor I Tokyopop editing manga before I hired him away to making my assistant so I know there's four people in that writing group who became professionals in science fiction and fantasy and their chosen field Peter always wanted to be an editor so of that writing group that we started there were there were about oh six of us in the earth early years from the writing group two of them are computer dudes you know you got a yacht except in their computer news thing you know they're our buddies we still let them sit in the right cup exactly they write code and they are they're actually good friends we find that that good critique errs who's writing you don't have to read can be actually a very valuable thing in a writing group because a good writing group is going to have number of submissions every week usually we find the two or three and this class you'll have five but usually we find two or three is ideal and so having it writing group of eight members where two or three of you submit significant chunks every other week and then a the rest of them are just really insightful readers makes for a stronger writing group than only writers that's what I've known gives you a little more bang for your proverbial buck by having some good range readers there and so perhaps some of you have spouses that you find have a good eye for reading you can stick them in the writing group and take advantage of them hi I hope you had a fun time yeah in your writing groups I want you to submit in case this wasn't made clear 1000 words every week that's not a very large chocolate okay it's actually quite small and in fact your writing group is more than welcome to make some changes to this this is what the class requires did Emily split you up by our cornice how hard core you are I am going to bring this up later but I guess there's gonna be a certain amount of shifting that will have to take place we can go ahead and shift around the writing groups Google had to rebuild the writing groups then and that'll be okay if there are those of you who are hardcore and if you want to bump up to 2,000 words a week I would not suggest more than 2,000 words for a 5 person writing group that's 10,000 words of reading that's fine I mean honestly you can you can read 10,000 words by the way you have to start thinking in word counts with other pages that's that's like you know over here on our little list of things to learn to look like a pro Oh number one is you start started for your word count I don't know if anything pages is anymore who cares what pages are pages you can make if you've learned this when someone says make a 10 page essay that can be anything you want it to be right word time is how the entire industry works and it's no longer an estimate based on yada yada yada it used to be an estimate it's like this member where it's just the Microsoft Word push the button that's the word count what Microsoft Word says your word count is start thinking word count start talking in waretown those talking in pages to editor human talking pages to readers but the editors are down the writers talking work now so 10,000 words is a manageable amount my writing group we do three submissions one thousand or three thousand H it's it's very manageable even with going through reading in a detailed way and things like that I wouldn't recommend much more than this another thing you could do in your writing group is you can alternate you could say these three are going to submit two thousand words this week and the next two are instant the two thousand words the next week that's perfectly acceptable to miss long as you know you're getting the average the trick is when I sit in on your class you all you're writing group you kind of have to tweet things and I'll warn you agreed before and so that you can each submit a thousand words so that I can you know that week you'll have to go to the other other stuff so that can be kind of kind of problematic with the two thousand word one I'll try to read on I can't promise that I will I'll read least a thousand words what yeah but if you're if you're you're thinking you're fairly hardcore do that if you're thinking I'm already going to be overloaded by writing 30,000 words a semester and having 18 credit hours and double majoring and you know like economics and pre-med or something like that then you can go ahead and just do the thousand words and that's all okay this is just with the with the minimum classes 2,000 words is it it's a better chunk to seek you sink your teeth into it you're gonna submit that every week what you're going to do in spinning that every week you're gonna post it to laughter I know I know there's lots of you then there's like this blackboard thing we could use and we can just use email emails terrible because people always have excuses the email doesn't work I found that when I started making people post it to live journal I'm instead of emailing all of this my computer didn't work excuses all went away magically people's computers magically started working better because LiveJournal timestamp it and things like that you're gonna post that on Monday okay is that what I say on there by midnight I'm really okay to layout or things like that what I wanted is it to be there to be read Tuesday morning so that people have time on their schedule to do the readings okay if you don't submit by then then I've got to take away points because there's got to be some forcing mechanism to get you doing that early enough that the right writer in your in your your group who wants to be reading that when it works for them to do so and so they don't have to like complain to me or complain to you give it up there don't make this an issue you should all get full points on this thing okay because if you're writing 3,000 words a week you'll be done with all the submissions you're going to need to make to your writing group by the end of the first run right okay so really do the 3,000 words a week get ahead all right right hard for a couple of a couple of weeks and then you'll never lose a single point by submission white cause you can always have them up there Monday night early Tuesday morning cuz you've already got it back okay all right so you're going to be submitting that every week yeah yes they do work very well maybe someday I will shift to something like that my journal is blogging and you can make comments and things like all right so when it's when you're giving feedback I would suggest a few rules of thumb the most important thing you can learn to do is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive all right what this means is that you are giving your response to the writing you are not fixing their writing it's a very important distinction a good editor will learn how to tell you how to fix something I don't trust any of you to do that yet perhaps you're good at it perhaps you will be able to but if what you say is I'm bored and then you say and you expand upon it I was breeding through here and these big long thick paragraphs I just kept wanting to move on with it or it felt like it wasn't going anywhere and or things like that that's actually far more useful to the writer then saying you should have ninjas attack or something like that you know the you should will actually risk varying their book off-course towards something you want it to be rather than what they want it to be this is particularly dangerous if you have discovered writers and you're in your group I guess the discovery writers will often say that's awesome I'll have ninjas and then suddenly they have this like totally schizophrenic book where everything is different every week snow is much danger for the for the the outliners they're like no no ninjas attack in chapter 37 I've already got so if you can learn to give good descriptive feedback for where you're confused where a character is not interesting to you or what you like where you laughed where you where you were confused all of these things what you are viewing yourselves as in this writing group when you're reading is you are then the test audience a lot of television shows and movies will use a test audience to judge the emotional reaction of their of their audiences they don't get a whole bunch of filmmakers and stick them in there did have you say well you should have framed that shot differently they get the people who would be watching the film or the television show these are the top target audience and see what their responses and then judge if they want that response sometimes as a writer you want them to be frustrated with the character that's okay that's quick anyone read The Wheel of Time there's practice there you're supposed to be frustrated about it and it's for the good of the story sometimes that's what you guys want to have happen in your writing and so when you're ready group says I'm so frustrated with them why can't you just get over this you know tackle let's say alright when he pits over it if you're doing appropriately they're going to have a good emotional response if you do a poorly maybe look she's gonna do anything folk down but this is these are things you're practicing and learning so that's why this whole descriptive thing is important number to try and view in context of the book alright in some cases this you may not be the target audience for this book we're gonna do it we're gonna try to split the writing groups up in a way that you are the part of the target audience okay but sometimes someone's working on a young adult book and you don't work you know you don't read that very much and you're like I want you know more depth of description here if things like that still your emotional response it's still good but sometimes when you can kind of put it in the context and think no they're probably doing this right it's what their book means yes it's mushy but this is the sort of my book once you know it's hard this is really dangerous to do it's really hard to do but I do want you to kind of consider the context of the book when you're framing your con your comments okay we'll try to mitigate this as best we can as the wick by the ways we split our writing group all right if you're being critiqued I would suggest strongly that you follow this one all important rule say nothing all right this is an age-old requirement in writing groups that has passed the test of time it's very good it's very useful for you to just stay out of it to not defend yourself to not explain what's going on it's hard they're like misunderstanding your book and you want to tell them how awesome your book is so you can show them just how awesome your book is it can be very difficult but the problem is the more you interfere the less valuable that feedback book will be to you the idea is you are the person with the clipboard at the back of the room is they are experiencing the story and they're having a conversation together about it and you are furiously writing down all these things such as yes they like this it worked really well for me for them is exactly what I want evil laughter or you're writing down wow they're really confused by this I didn't display explain this very well at all I'll try that in the next chapter and see if they give at that time if you instead say well this is what it is you don't get the chance to explain in the next chapter and see if you can do it and therefore you get better at telling people about your book and you don't get better at writing your book okay you I had a really solid writing group I have a writing who filled with pros and semi-pros I take about 2 out of 5 comments and actually apply them to my work okay you can use this to gauge the feel but don't completely start changing your store because of what people are saying use it to make little tweaks and also seven side for use when you're revising when I'm gonna do my renovations I go back to what they said about the chapter I've reread the chapter I reread their revisions and once I've had that distance from it which is really important for revision I would say wow they were right I need to change this and this right here is a great you know this this this will fix my story by fixing this and this and this this is just my loonie friend who always harps on this thing goodbye you know it used to that some quirks of writing groups writing groups you're bad with pacing okay pacing writing groups are bad and judging pacing this is because you're having a week between seems to even gonna be worse with you guys with 1000 words okay they can try and they'll say this I think is feeling kind of slow to me or this is feeling very abrupt to me and go ahead and write it down but in these cases lots of pacing issues you want to give the full book to somebody or at least the full sequence of somebody to read and see what they feel okay because it's really hard even as an experienced writing Gruber to say on a piece that you're reading across the course of five months whether something's moving too fast or slow okay keep that in mind another thing writing groups will get will give as they will on they will pick up on certain things that they will harp on I'm not even sure how to write this down but for instance if one Ranger member says wow you used to call it green all the time from then on every person that writing group is going to notice every time you infuse something something green and it may not actually be an issue but the next time you come to the writing group they're like I circle all the green parts and everyone's like yeah I did too and you get this sort mindset in your writing group that small things can become big issues to the writing group over time that are not actually big issues be aware that that happens I don't know how to warn you about it other than to just say this happens okay but the good things about a writing group outweigh these sorts of things I think the good things about a writing group will give you a test audience to try your fiction out on you can try things out and see you know if you're writing a humorous narrative and my humorous am I able to write a character what do they think about this character all of these things can be wonderful so you guys got that done all this this is this is this is how you're gonna do your writing groups now we're going to go over the structure all right I used to give this as a suggestion and then peopled ignored it because I told them they keep ignoring my suggestions so now I just say we're gonna do it okay number one when you sit down um I would suggest that you have kind of somebody in charge you can in charge it can change or whatever but the idea is this person is going to going to time the whole thing and make sure that you're moving at a good clip we're gonna have five or six people in these writing groups you're gonna have about an hour for your workshopping that means that we really need you to be spending about ten minutes per person all right ten minutes per person means that you're going to have to keep it moving okay and the person in charge what you can do is you can move them through the phases of this whole thing a little more quickly you can finish some of you are going to be a type personalities you'll love this okay you just make everybody doing stay but the idea is to keep it moving and to make sure if someone gets going on one issue that's going to long say we really need to move on so find someone who's comfortable saying that and go ahead and do it writing group should be fun I don't want to like make a you know they're writing for not to use in charge with you all but you know there's somebody who's taking the class a few times maybe put them in charge or you know something like that talking above yourselves your your your big kids you can figure it out put somebody in charge okay number two you're gonna move through the phases of the writing group where you're going to begin with good things this is what's working for you the emotional responses you had you've got to do this okay it's easy to focus on the criticism you're talking and your English classes to focus on the criticism the good things are gonna be just as important to that writer to know what they are nailing and what they're hitting characters that you're enjoying what narrative parts are making you black that's supposed to be funny or cry if it's not supposed to your emotional investment here and there where you felt excited all of these things important stuff to get down okay thanks to your leader once that kind of conversation has died down it's going to move you on to big problems these are they these are larger than a sentence level thing don't tell them during the big problems face that you know you use the wrong there don't tell them that unless they do it every week and they don't know the difference between them then you can becomes a big problem but don't say that don't say yo you forgot to fill you in here ignore that if you if it drives you crazy which it does some people to not be giving people that print off the document three didn't mark it up give it to them at the end of the the writing group session okay alright and then they get there at their feedback some writing groups really like to do that with everybody mark up a copy and hand it hand it back to them it can be really helpful for all these sentence level things but we won't get time to your big problems are you know what I talked about earlier where your board it's not like stuff it's like oh we put this book book down and throw it out the window but it's the things you know we're then the counterpart to the good things all right talk about that for a little while and then at the end you can go ahead and have your leader let them ask them ask questions don't do this the first couple of times then go ahead and move into this and say okay do you have any questions so the person who's been quiet the whole time and the first things say oh he felt this about this character do you guys talk more on that and see because you know if they have a discussion about it then good and you get more feedback all right you're three phases one person is in charge of kind of moving you through them and keep you going at a good clip if you know your whole writing group decides you want to spend more time and do things longer and have you know more submissions that's okay but I'm going to suggest we only do that if you're in one of the hardcore writing groups which I will do in the splitting up of in a few minutes here so that someone doesn't feel embarrassed by being the only one in the writing there who really just only wants to do without the words and really does want to get out of here in a reasonable hour okay alright so don't you know but I'll give you guys the people who wanted to have for our writing groups okay you're not gonna for our range but who want to be able to go long and do 2,000 words and things like that I'll give you guys the chance to be in a writing group that that that facilitates that otherwise let's try and keep it on task and I'm at a good pace people have places to be and plus the longer you talk the more you're going to stray into the prescriptive changes or the or the you know you don't know how to use the progressive tense and sentence or something like that whatever progressed so tense sooo so does this make sense to everybody all right you may think that I'm harping on this a little bit much but like I said a bad writing group can actually be worse than you're writing for your writing then then helpful it can take and destroy particularly the discovery writers and getting completely splashed off course by a bad writing room and I want you have a good experience in the render at the end of this course you may decide writing groups just aren't for you that's fine you don't ever have to do one again unless you know you for some reason take the classic it like you are welcome to if you want but I want the face to face I find that online writing groups for me are not as effective and I want you to practice face to face and that brings up another good thing I would rather your writing groups be a discussion okay a lot of writing groups particularly new writers in courses at BYU it will be like alright who has something to say and like go down the line and each person says something I would rather you not do that I would rather you say have the leader say alright who has a good thing someone says a good thing and then you discuss it say yeah I really like that and I thought I like this part too isn't tied into that rather than okay what are your good things okay what are your good things I'd like you to have a conversation about it that does put a more onus on the person in charge because one of your jobs will be making sure that everyone has a chance to speak if there's somebody like me and the ready group or just like the blab you're gonna have to be like alright we haven't heard from Sarah in a while Sarah did you have anything you wanted to say regarding this and that sort of things so that does put an onus upon you to do that everyone be aware of it if you're naturally a blabber like me then be aware that you need to make room for everyone else to give things to say same goes for the big problem so I would rather have it be a discussion have someone bring something up and if you don't agree say you know what I didn't feel that have a discussion about it it's okay really it's going to be more helpful to the writer to listen to what the readers same in the discussion forum as you talked about the piece as opposed to listing on going through lists of things about the piece okay that's kind of a hard dynamic to enforce upon you because it really means you guys have to get comfortable each other and you'll do this more and more as the semester progresses sorry about that so yeah any other questions about the writing groups yes yes yeah or I mean I have frequently had people bring their spouses to the right of your portion of the class you're free to do that going back there any groups tend to get as the class progresses I'm not all of them get this way but people start bringing treats people started running pizza or whatever and having their writing group and things like that that's fine too bringing in your spouse if they're at home writing group is okay with having another person the problem is your writing groups are going to be so tight at the ten minute mark that more people is probably not necessarily going to be more helpful to you because you know we give about forty-five minutes per piece or a half hour in my writing group plenty of time to talk for everybody but in ten minutes and so you know be careful about that we don't want these writing groups to get to be like 20 people look like your roommates friend coming along and things like that in my writing group we email submissions to everybody to each other on Monday and then we read them all and we make together a chat about it all right all right so I want you to start a new story for this this class is focused on long-form we will go ahead and have some lectures on short stories preferably by Eric but we are focused on long store on long-form the ideal thing for you to do would probably be to try to write a 30,000 word novella novellas work like a novel they have a lot of this exercise a lot of the same muscles but then you can actually finish something I released a 30,000 word novella last year and BER sold that's about the length that you are shooting for in this class you can instead start a new novel and just plan that you would keep going after the class that's pretty cool too because it will force you to keep writing hopefully theoretically perhaps but I do want you to start something new rather than something you've been working on one of the reasons for this is a lot of a lot of writers who want to become pros get stuck in a rut of working on the same concept over and over and over again I don't want to let you keep doing that I don't want you to keep let you keep working on that story that you've workshopped in three different writing classes so far it's not about you know me arbitrarily wanting you to do new work for this class it's about me wanting you to break out of that and there are probably some of you who are like that in this class there always are a few who've been working on this project that is like this green project that you've had going for years and years and years and no let's put it aside a couple reasons for that I want you to be experimenting in this class where the things I talked about verse like discovery writing versus architect writing and I don't want you to be too emotionally tied to the story that you're working from if you work on something new you will begin to you you'll I think be more free to do this it'll also teach you again that writers right writers don't have one story that they're going to tell most of the time they have they have a skill in writing they tell a lot of them stories ideas are cheap alright ideas are cheap you may have an idea that you think is just awesome and perhaps it is but a good writer can take terrible ideas and write a fantastic story and a bad writer will take the best ideas in the world and go nowhere with it great example of this Jim Butcher very nice fellow he writes some some urban fantasy books which are which are quite well written and some epic fantasies which I actually like even more Jim Butcher was on a forum arguing with someone about this topic Jim Butcher is a writer the person he was are with whom he was arguing I assume was not there maybe a pretend writer but they they were not really a writer because this person was saying no no the ones who make it are the ones who have the great ideas those are the people who make it and that's what people are going for and Jim argued no the people who make it the people have the skill as a writer they've trained themselves in they got in this big argument at the end of it Jim said all right you give me your worst ideas and I'm gonna write a book about them it's gonna be awesome and so the person said okay I want you to write a book combining the raht lost roman legion and poke him on this is true I got Jim to confirm it to me lost Roman legion in Pokemon he wrote his epic fantasy series that called codex Alera which is about the lost room in religion using these these elemental based uh pet things that they bond with and stuff and it's pretty awesome alright and it is what's at six books bestsellers and I've read them and they're good so lost Roman legion meets Pokemon was that Alright ideas are cheap the more you train yourself to write the more ideas you will have and soon you will have more ideas than you can write I'm going to prove to you that ideas are cheap several points during this class during which we'll brainstorm ideas I don't know if we have time to do that today because I probably want to get into the world-building but we'll see but we will brainstorm we will come up with great ideas for stories we will have on that day you walk out with an idea for six different books all right in fact I want to do that let's do that we're going to come up with ideas for six do for books that are gonna be cool you can see anytime you go to like writing conferences people will do things like this or just got card has the thing what's he call 100 ideas in an hour a thousand ideas in an hour where you are brainstorming and things like this now we will get into some world building but I'm a save the world building until after I've got you jump-started on your writing all right what I want you to do is if you've got an idea you've been wanting to write on that's okay you can go with that but a really good story in my opinion on long-form this doesn't apply as well the short storm short form is going to mix three things it's going to mix a good setting idea all right setting is why you're in this class rather than in another class the creative writing class we science fiction/fantasy have much more of a focus on setting than other genres do the idea for us is that the setting is a living breathing character and we I include a lot of different things in this and this idea for setting it's all of the sort of science fiction and fantasy stuff I don't start a book until I've got a couple of good ideas for a setting all right you combine that with a character I usually want to start with a good idea for character an idea for a character is really a character conflict alright a good character conflict then you mix that with a plot idea plot is generally the place where you're going to take where it's going to be the least original people talk about they're only being a certain number of plots and to an extent it's true I don't want to you know again downplay the art of all of this and whatnot but there are certain forms you use to tell a story a certain plot arcs that have been very successful most stores are gonna fall into these you know the underdog success story or the the journey the quest the mystery these sorts of things are kind of thought it is but you can't have an interesting idea for your twist on an interesting plot okay and so I usually start want to have it when I have a few of each of these and they begin combining interesting ways and that makes me want to write a story so we're gonna try brainstorming this today and I want we're gonna do this differently than I did last year and we'll maybe do this the way I did last year um during the character thing but why don't we go ahead and brainstorm a couple of a rich interesting setting concepts places you haven't seen a story take place a magic system based on something interesting or a world element that you you haven't seen something there's pops into your head what happened what would be cool what just throw them out at me okay Stone Age Africa good setting I'm actually gonna try and write these so you can read them because we'll need them later innate talents okay talents okay what else lets you know what let's just do places right now we'll do magic in a second do places floating islands okay what else okay okay Wow very nice yes all right well what else do we got interesting places it doesn't have to be things like this what's uh what's uh what's a room or a profession that someone could have that has an interesting setting attached to it okay a dentist office okay I like that okay Cathedral what's different about this Cathedral no no no no this is good see you're laughing but this is good space Cathedral uh-huh okay space Cathedral but the other side of a mirror okay okay over here abandoned spaceship okay okay okay whoo ocean under icecap I like that okay oh that's good all right okay different universe where the laws of physics are different what law of physics is different there okay light moves in a different speed all right all right slow light universe it's a very interesting story called slow glass by the way where someone made a glass that when light hit it it traveled slowly through the glass and so you could take it out have the get a picture and move it somewhere and then it would show on the other side the light would eventually get through very interesting all right so let's um let's let's stick with these for a second now let's go ahead and ask for a few more interesting technologies or or magics or things like that okay portable black hole Asimov had those eye color magic okay unzip anything whoo I like that idea all right further ambient temperature describe that more okay ambient temperature okay all right all right so yes ooh street corner goes back in time time control okay time manipulation let's do one more okay someone hasn't said one okay okay we're just gonna go pods all right all right so we've got some cool things over here now let's go ahead and try some plot hooks all right what's uh what's an interesting what's with let's go ask favorite movies someone raised their hand tell me your favorite movie okay all right let's go someone who hasn't talked before you may have but uh the hobbits your favorite movie okay let's break down the Hobbit what's the plot of the hobbit journey plot The Hobbit is a journey to a place what can we do what would be an interesting plot that turns that on his head a journey to someplace you wouldn't expect someone to be taking a journey toward no a journey to the afterlife okay journey to the afterlife okay so this is going to be our our plot concept one of our plot concepts the idea would be that you would be laying this on top of a plot archetype like The Hobbit except instead you're journeying to or through the afterlife of some sort okay what's another favorite movie Gattaca okay Gattaca is a tough one to break down what would you say the or plot of Gattaca is if you're breaking it down okay excellent that's a good way to break it down there are different ways you can do that but that's good okay so you've got two brothers trying to prove to each other who's better the the underdog brother and the overachieving brother all right how can we turn that to sibling relationship on into something interesting for ourselves well do both of yours okay schizophrenic sibling that we could go with I'm worried that there's a lot of schizophrenic stories out there these days but competing against an imaginary brother is a pretty cool thing okay okay the older brother had everything and was just like a man in the iron mask sort of thing the younger brother like or the younger brother like how'd he take it from him okay or some let's do that we can do this okay okay older brother this could be sister to older sibling suddenly loses everything that's a decent plot hook I think you'd go place with that okay okay so there there there's a plot there to the idea that older brother has everything everything's going well then he he dies and he has to help his younger brother who with whom he's estranged from achieve everything that he wanted to achieve okay ghost Bros okay let's go ahead and move on to another plot archetype here what's a favorite movie movie movie in the corner Count of Monte Cristo pretty easy what is it revenge ooh revenge has been done a lot can we do some new kind of revenge can we say vengeance against someone unexpected or vengeance for something unexpected alright well we'll get all three of you okay against the secretary revenge against secretary okay okay okay we can write that down zombie revenge okay zombie revenge okay antihero story then sort of thing okay okay that actually is going to change we can put that up that's actually more like that that's a different plot that's a hunted plot that's uh that's the fugitive and that's a different plot archetype we can we could do that one next but let's let's deal with this revenge thing let's let's try and dig deeper okay let's try and do a different type of revenge story who what yeah Wow okay revenge okay I totally wrote that wrong past self alright okay I'm liking this I'm liking this okay what do you have okay okay okay so it's kind of like someone blew up the planet and this person is going to go get revenge for the whole human race I like that I like that okay Leia's vengeance okay we're just gonna call it that but that's what that one is okay this is last human in the universe gets revenge and time on entire people who blew up our planet I like that okay well this is our last one okay revenge against deities what's different about these deities okay no I want to know what's different about the deities though what are they what kinds of gods are they what are they okay gods during their day jobs I kind of like that okay I like these I've seen both of those things a little bit before let's try and push a little harder what kind of differ that do we have anything else we can put that up if we don't okay that's that ones I've seen a lot before so we'll go ahead and step away from that one but it is a good idea so okay revenge against deities I'm gonna go with the day job one unless Lilly got what we're here okay that one's weird to wrap my mind around a head you're my head my head it round you're gonna keep that one you can use it later well I'm just gonna go I've meant to do the deities that weird a job meaning they're regular folks who took a stint as deities doesn't mean day job but it means they spent at the time as deities and now that they someone else has taken that you know this deity now you're gonna hunt them down and they have residual abilities or something like that okay so you see we've got all of these things here we've got some pretty cool things up here we're gonna now go and we're gonna do the last one and we we don't I'll try and do this one a little bit better when we have more time for characters but let's let's do a few characters okay so let's do um give me an age and a gender just someone go ahead forty-five-year-old what woman okay and one male okay five girl okay eighty year old man okay one thousand man and we're gonna do dog okay we'll just try it out okay we're gonna all right now our 45 year old woman tell me something tell me her job that's an unusual job for her okay I 45 year old mortician okay what else unusual job for the 21 year old male he's a novelist okay okay our five year old girl not really profession but their family's profession oh five year old shaman I like that that works that works okay the 80 year old man unusual job for the 80 year old man singer of source celebrity of some sort it doesn't have to be pop singer but yes okay thousand year old man vampire okay there's a lot of vamps out there what's his job okay he hangs with the mortician he's a dentist maybe maybe and they're paired this is a group okay the dog a bartender I love that bartender okay dogs bartender all right all right so what we're gonna do now is we're actually gonna try and construct some stories out of these things okay very quickly because we do have a lot of time and what we're gonna try and do is we're gonna try and connect one thing from each group into a story that's interesting we're gonna try and stay away from silly unless you're doing middle grade middle grade likes silly and so we can we can stray a little more silly that way but what's that or Robert asprin I mean you can do silly but it's got to be humorous silly it can't be just ridiculous ridiculous of snakes I guess aspirin was ridiculous religion anyway all right so what are we going to do here I'm gonna say that I really I really like we're gonna just start with the let's start with a fantasy one let's start with the dentist's office all right what can we connect this from from any of these it doesn't have to be that can make the dentist's office more interesting okay okay okay that's for what else do we got what else we got over here Abraham only open at night okay dentist only open at night I think we're pushing toward the vampire what other ideas do we have here okay okay that's interesting that would make that would be an interesting short story I'm not sure if there's a novel there but that is a short story concept and I like that one so you can go we can go ahead and write that one down dentist's office portal things like I'm just want explore where else we go okay okay that's our time manipulation thing okay how does that relate to be into the dentist though I mean you could just yeah they said that's the gas that's not the dentist office why is the dentist office important okay yeah see I'm more interested in something like that I'm more interested in Stone Age African dentist okay why why am I most interested in that one it's because that seems number one it takes us to a new time in place we remember I'm not looking for ridiculous connections and a lot of these sounded a little bit ridiculous or quirky what I'm looking for in this is something that has an innate conflict and takes us to an interesting time in place that we that we can tell a whole story about and so for me I would immediately contact do this what do you do with a stone age Africa and the dentist okay let let's stay for things up here we're gonna stay we don't want to add new stuff to this right now I'm gonna stay what else do we connect I'm gonna give you Stone Age dentist in Africa what else do we connect it does fit pretty well with a five year old shaman doesn't it so I'm going to go ahead and connect that one over here so the five year old shaman is connected to the dentist I'm gonna guess she's not the dentist that she's the apprentice to the dentist okay right who is the shaman but also the healer so tell me more whoa hey I like that I like that okay so we've got the time travel here so we have a dentist what did you know and all he can do right and he's training this five-year-old shaman but he's really teaching her science modern science okay that's cool this is working what else okay I like that that works sacred mouth okay okay we've got a situation we do not have a prom a plot archetype okay so let's see we're gonna do all four of you guys so five of you guys okay we're gonna hear them all then we'll figure out so let's go right here okay okay so we could totally do the revenge plot revenge for her tribe okay okay um I'm kind of bored by that plot okay with there's got to be something happening sitting and teaching isn't something happening can you make hats something happen he dies and she becomes his spirit guide see do you see the difference there between she teaches him and she leads him look for activity okay I'm trying to get ya we'll get into these things nitty gritties but I kind of this like this is an object lesson for so I like that one you can do the journey to the afterlife with her so you could do the revenge one that's not the deities but you know what I'm saying you could do the journey to Africa in this plot archetype oh go ahead yeah both of you will do Jane first because I know her name uh-huh okay okay there there is a danger in here so but what is the plot what happens ghost brother gets into who or whom okay okay and what does that lead to what conflict does that lead to what's the problem okay he is trying to destroy the dentist okay see pushing for conflict and story we want to we want to transition from from situation to story good uh-huh yeah okay excellent even better if it's true so okay so we've got we've got things going on that still a bit of a situation rather than a plot but I like where that's going if you were discovered writing that would be plenty for you to start with and then go and see where it goes but you would need a big problem for that story something probably bigger than both tribes but with the place we could go okay uh-huh okay okay who's trying to stop him past self his past self or his brother either one of those could work his brother banished him here or he had he had a change of heart I like this past self thing because I think you could do something with that maybe we'll do that next all right let's do this and then we'll go there and then we'll move on to them okay mm-hmm yep so you're gonna make the dentist into the vampire which is totally possible with this right Yeah right you've got I've got this monster who can teach me things in that case I would up her age probably to eight or nine at the youngest and that's going to be it something you'd have to decide whether the five-year ago as the Perez the main character or not as the spirit guide for the journey the afterlife five is fine I've got a five-year-old son that would be really frustrating if that were my you know like there's things the five-year-old and that could be that could frustrating means good right conflict is good but five-year-old as an protagonist is gonna be really hard to write upping the age to like a 12 year old versus the vampire suddenly you've got this interesting sort of middle grade story or maybe why a story that you could do with them as a protagonist alright okay yeah yeah yeah you could totally work something like that like it's not actually Africa Stone Age it's Africa Stone Age in the future because it's dystopian we've collapsed and somebody has managed to get there with real information or whatnot you can totally do that alright there isn't one more hand over here and then we'll move on to another one okay alright so you kind of see what I'm doing here this is off the cuff right most of the times when I'm doing this I've spent months coming up with the different things on the board and I'm combining them in interesting ways this is one way to create a story if you've walked in here and you heard me say I don't know what to write he's making me not write something you can pick something like this you can do this with your friends if you're really like one of these stories we were talking about you just love you can go ahead and write that it doesn't matter if multiple people write it it's okay listen for the class here you if you want to jump on it and say I'm gonna go with that story and see where it takes me you go right ahead we're gonna do one more of these than we'll talk about a few other things so let's go ahead I really like the the revenge against past self concept let's try and expand that by combining with something interesting else on the board or yeah is there something interesting on the board that we haven't done yet that the past self one could do and all right we'll go here there and then there oh ha ha that's awesome that works really well okay okay awesome okay could be that something like that they mean anything that popped into my mind was you have the past self went through some sort of redemption right you have you haven't evil dude goes through Redemption sees in the future and sees what happens to him and doesn't want that to happen to him or something like that and so you've got this conflict between for future self and past self where one is trying to you know something like that could be really interesting old Spock yeah something like that so let's uh let's take one of these and add more to it just to keep to keep doing this let's go ahead and let's stick them let's stick one of these characters over here in here do our we fine with the 80 year old man the eight year old singer we're gonna do this 80 year old bard is our main character it doesn't have to be pop singer can be pop singer let's we did the last one turned out to be science fiction II let's do this one more fantasy so let's add a magic to this not a science which of these magics are we gonna add over here the eye color magic okay what is the eye color magic do somebody who hasn't raised their hand yet have you taught what's that one yet no go for it okay excellent elemental colors what will my colors changed okay his eye color sorry or he's heterochromatic or something like that cool two different eye colors or something okay so his eye colors changing you can do magic based on your eye color elementary control let's give him something that has to do with singing so you know his eye color lets him do something magically with them with this okay wow that's pretty good very well done okay he can hold his breath as long as he wants oh that's cool okay we're gonna go with heterochromatic he's got both of those right no that's actually pretty cool if you imagine someone who was able to do pyrotechnics you know if we hadn't done it already you could already I also have the person that travels back in time and it's like you know he's a rock star from the future who gets trapped in the fantasy world that's actually been done a little bit spell singer you can go look that up but it's fun but anyway okay is there anything else we can add to that to make it even more interesting something we've done up here can we add one of the other characters in as a foil right over here okay that could be cool very well done okay what else someone hasn't talked yet spoken yet come on quiet people I'm gonna make you do something pick one of these up here try and combine them in an interesting way you've already talked okay okay go for it okay okay the mortician wanting his eyes makes a little more sense in the vampire I think I like that Alright selling and swapping outing people's oh wow there you go there you go okay alright we're gonna we're going to stop this for now we could keep going on this but this is not necessarily how I come up with books but it is kind of what you can do in 30 minutes version of how I come up with books it is one way to come up with stories these sorts of things are particularly good for discovery writers doing a brainstorming session like this going and looking for writing prompts online and combining three of them in an interesting way what you're looking for in that methodology is combining things in an interesting way that creates conflict all right so story is about conflict if you don't have things going wrong you don't have a story you also want to try and create a story where your protagonist can have an active role rather than a completely reactive role this is tough if you look at any superhero movie you'll see how tough it is to make the protagonist active and not just reacting to what the villains are doing so as you design your plot and your story that's what I want you to kind of be focusing on I want you to be focusing on an interesting conflict for a character but you have your character have passions other than the story it's the plot have them have a life other than whatever is gonna hit them like a freight train okay make them interesting in their own right regardless of which style of writing you're using and then try to think about how am I going to make them active rather than reactive we are about out of time I think I want to save a big world building lesson for next time even though the dude wanted one who's the dude that wanted one yeah we'll do a big world building one next time I really want to get you jump-started on your story before we talk too much about world building you need to be jump-starting been thinking about things like this conflict and that sort of thing so brainstorming first I think was the better idea let's do questions for just a minute or two now you're still working to that process I want you to have one by next week in other words I want your first thousand words submitted for next week it can be really rough remember we're not going to grate these qualitatively but I want you to come up with something by Monday a thousand words that you've written okay and this is going to be some sort of new story in fact I want you to not be to anything for this class you can write 3,000 words on it then abandon it and start again I would really rather you not do that more than a once but you can do that okay and I want you to be thinking about something like this perhaps you have an idea already you haven't written on has to be something you haven't written on and you want to go for it that's okay too but ask yourself some of these questions can I make my protagonist a little more dynamic what is my plot archetype for this story and how can I make it less of a situation and more of a story and what is you know what type of plot archetype is this and well how am I going to put my own twist on it how's it not going to be just another revenge story how's it going to be my revenge story how's it gonna be interesting we'll talk more about how to do that as the course progresses but I wanted to give you something to kick you off
