Saturday | Grass Valley Workshop - The Art of Writing--and Finishing--Your Novel (or Any Big Project)

One of the biggest obstacles any writer faces is finishing the first draft of a novel. As Joyce Carol Oates said, "Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor." Enter Grant Faulkner, exec director of NaNoWriMo, the organization that has generated thousands of first-time novels, and created one of the most effective approaches to writing a first draft.

Faulkner (also the author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo), will discuss the power of diving in, banishing one's inner editor, taking creative risks, and making a plan to finish your novel in 2020.

This is your year to finish the book of your dreams. Come with laptop or notepad and be prepared to write!

Friday | Rocklin Workshop - The Art of Brevity: Less Can Be More

In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert's mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what's left out of a story is often more important than what's included. A single sentence can serve the function that a paragraph or even a chapter might in a longer work.

Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story and San Francisco's Flash Fiction Collective, will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit. Come prepared to write short pieces and explore the expansiveness of succinctness.

"The Toad"

by Grant Faulkner

​ Flattened by a car, its arms spread out, a little like Jesus. The sun had baked it as crisp as a potato chip.

“Poor toad,” Maria said. “Didn’t know how to cross the road.”

“Maybe he thought the car was a new friend,” I said. “Rushing to greet him.”

“Or he was puzzling how such a small thing in the distance could become so large.”

We spent hours in such conversations. It was nice, how we never talked about what was next, who we were together. As if the toad wasn’t part of every story in its way, even ours.

Going Long. Going Short.

Excerpt from New York Times

This exerpt was published in the 2019 Sierra Writers Newsletter

A few years ago, however, a friend of mine, Paul Strohm, wrote a memoir consisting of 100 100-word stories. He modeled the form after a fixed-lens camera, with the idea that an arbitrary limit inspired compositional creativity. I tried my hand at writing such tiny stories because I like to experiment, but I quickly became exasperated by my early attempts.

Most of my writing life has been a training ground of “more.” In the many creative-writing workshops I have attended, I so frequently heard “I want to know more about _______ .” More characterization, more back story, more details — more of everything. Rarely did anyone advise places to cut or condense. And I gave similar feedback, as if being tapped on the knee with a doctor’s rubber hammer.

I’d trained myself to write through back stories, layers of details and thickets of connections, but the more I pared my prose to reach 100 words, a different kind of storytelling presented itself.

Flash fiction, is defined as being a story under 1,000 words, and goes by the names of “short shorts,” “miniatures,” “sudden fiction” and “postcard fiction.”

This form speaks to the singularity of stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them.

Our lives are as much about the unspoken as the spoken.

Each line of a flash story must carry a symbolic weight that moves the story forward. Yet, at the same time, the gaps within and around the story speak as large as the text itself.

Such evocative, fragmentary brevity makes this Twitter and Facebook era perfect for flash fiction. Flash allows literature to be a part of our everyday life, even if we are strange multitasking creatures addled by a world that demands more, more, more.