Wednesday Workshop

Patricia started by asking us about structure. Pretty much everyone admitted to problems with structure. She explained that she was going to teach structure by teaching film structure, and recommended three books on script writing.

How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days/Carr (restorative three-act structure)

How to Write Screenplays That Sell/Hauge

Alternative Script Writing/Dancynger

She told us about her first novel, and how she turned it into a screenplay just to see what would happen, and that it turned out Act II was missing.

Restorative three-act structure:

Act I

There’s a plot point near the end—a gate, something happens, the character cannot turn back. Often appears to be a solution to the dilemma.

Act II

The biggest act.

Send your character up a tree and throw stones.

Often the character seems to be running away from fate.

Reaches its climax as character has to face consequences of false solution.

Often a peak moment of identification.

Act III

Usually upbeat.

Character has the energy for resolution.

            She then provided us different models for stories. The reversal involves an overall shift from light to dark, unity to chaos, or the reverse. The battle plot involves thinking of a story as a war. First you have to get your fighters fighting, then you put them in lots of small battles of increasing intensity, and you finish with a final battle and a walking away from the fight. Finally, she recommended us a book by her student, BYRD by Kim Church, and what I think was an essay, “Quilting Without a Pattern” on the Bloom website, to talk about writing a novel like a crazy quilt. Just “write the islands” and then see if you need to build any bridges between them.

            She talked about public stakes as opposed to private stakes. Private stakes are the personal lives of the characters. Public stakes are, Hurricane Katrina for A City of Refuge, the importance of accepting queer people in most of the fiction I read, the Vietnam War in Patricia’s book.

            We got an assignment. Take three index cards. Label them Act I, Act II, and Act III. Write everything you can come up with that happens in each act on the index card. For Act II, make sure to write on both sides of the index card. If you have room (I didn’t) put in plot points, individual scenes, rising tension. How can things get worse? Are there public and private stakes?

            Last topic of the day: We talked about organization. Patricia used to use composition notebooks, but could never find anything. Now she’s trying notecards in a notecard file. Others use binders of loose-leaf. One fellow writes a 90-page draft of every novel—I might have to try that. Bart Shoup interviewed novelists about their process. We shared ideas. Some of us used Scribner. I wrote a website to keep track of my multiverse. Some of us carried wee notebooks and transferred things to the computer.