Outlines

Eldest's friend, Raider King, has been visiting with us recently.  For those who missed out on previous posts, he moved in with us for a few months until he could find a job and his own place. 

He did, but the place turned out to be a disaster, including a black mold that started growing everywhere after the basement flooded during heavy rains.  The room he was renting was in the basement. 

Long story short, he ended up moving to a nearby city with his bio-dad, where he got another job and his soap opera life continues.  It's been good to have him back again for a visit.  And to feed him.  

We'll not go into that long and sordid tale.

Our library system has a Writer in Residence program, with a different local author every year.  It seems our city is teeming with excellent writers, and they are willing to share their expertise in a number of mentorship programs, talks, workshops and so on.

Eldest has been trying to talk me into doing NaNoWriMo this year.  When I saw the library was doing a NaNoWriMo related event with their Writer in Residence, I signed all three of us up (Youngest has no interest at all).  We went to it tonight and it was really quite interesting. 

The topic was making outlines for novels, ranging from the vague and general, to one with a bit more detail to outlines that flesh out all the major events in the plot.  The author was informative and enjoyable to listen to.  There were a couple of unpleasant things.  He had use doing a couple of exercises.  One was a game where we were to make four statements about ourselves.  Three were to be true, one was to be a lie.  Then we were asked to split off into groups (not with the people we came with).  We'd read our list out to our partner(s), and they would ask questions to try and figure out which statement was a lie.

I had the hardest time coming up with a lie.  Eldest didn't take part at all. 

The purpose was to demonstrate how asking questions about our characters would help us flesh them out and make them believable.  The game, however, didn't seem to go much to demonstrate that.  As Eldest said later on, while she understands why it's used, she finds this style of teaching very manipulative.  Why not just tell us what we're supposed to know?  We could never do well under the Socratic Method! *L*

My problem was with the "lie."  I don't lie.  I hate lies.  I had a revelation about lying when I was a child and decided it was more important to me to tell the truth and deal with the consequences then it was to lie and get away with something.  My personal sense of integrity was more valuable to me than not getting in trouble.  So being told to tell a lie about myself, then make it convincing under questioning, just rubbed me the wrong way. 

Of course, there was no need to "lie" about anything.  This is an exercise in fiction writing.  Why not say, "make 3 non-fiction statements and 1 fictional statement," instead?  There's a big difference between saying something about yourself that is a lie and creating a fictional scenario.  I suppose it's a matter of semantics, but accuracy in wording is important to me.

Anyhow.

The whole thing took about an hour and a half, including the Q&A portion.  Afterwards, the author stayed to talk to people and answer their questions.  Eldest, Raider King and I headed out, but got so engrossed talking about outlines, writing, character development and so on, we ended up stopping at a coffee shop so we could sit and chat about it some more.

All in all, it was an enjoyable evening, and I'm glad we went.  It wasn't as much use for Eldest, since her focus is very different than novel writing, but Raider King does a lot of writing and plans to do NaNoWriMo this year, so it worked out for him.

As for me doing NaNoWriMo, I'm still  not sure if I'm going to take the plunge.  My problem is that I've no idea what I would write about.  I have several potential projects, but none of them are the sort of thing I'd want to do for NaNoWriMo.  Of course, there's also the never ending problem of carving out the uninterrupted time to write, even if I did know what I'd write about.

We shall see how it works out.