Saturday | Grass Valley Workshop - SCENE. SUMMARY. REFLECTION: The Essential Narrative Trio for Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Memoir

Whether we’re telling our own story or one we’re inventing, that story—whatever its genre, or its length—needs to unfold scene by scene. But it’s a rare story that’s told only through scene—summary is both a vital and deft way to move our narrative along. It’s vital to understand the differences between these two essentials as we forge character and develop action. In this workshop we’ll take a look at what goes into building a scene, how that differs from summary, and when we use one or the other. We’ll also add one more essential: reflection. Characters, real and fictional, must be given opportunities to reflect on their circumstances. There are as many ways to do this, and styles in which it can be accomplished, as there are writers, and we’ll use our time together to explore a few examples, drawn from works of fiction and memoir. You’ll also have an opportunity to begin to apply this vital narrative trio to your own work.

How to Make Workshops Work

Chapter excerpt from the book

Tools of the Writer's Craft by Sands Hall

[This article appeared in the Sierra Writers October 2019 Newsletter]

The workshop—a forum for critical thinking—has become a popular and widespread phenomenon. It gives us insights: into art, craft, and technique. A workshop offers a pragmatic opportunity to give and receive feedback on the art and craft of writing.

[When writing] all too often, in the process of stringing sentences together, we grow frustrated—and our story, short or long, slips from our grasp.

In this regard workshops can be very helpful. They can help us recover the original germ of a story that has gotten lost; can assist with an ending that doesn’t pull together; and, perhaps, most valuable, can help us find the story we didn’t know we were telling.

Let’s take a look at this word, critical. In addition to the meaning that it is something essential to a given endeavor, the usual sense of the word criticism, or the phrase to criticize, is “to react to something negatively.”

But that’s limited. Here are a few definitions, courtesy of Webster’s, to consider anew:

Critical: Marked by careful and exact judgement and evaluation.

Criticism: The art, skill or profession of making discriminating judgements, especially of literary or artistic works.

Note: This does not say negative judgements, but, rather, careful and discriminating ones.

Thus, a workshop gives a group of perceptive people the opportunity to make perceptive comments and discriminating judgments of literary work.

The [workshop] is not a place to practice shredding, scalping, and ego-blasting. Nor is it a contest in being “nice.”

As a workshop participant, part of your task is to ensure that each of your peers returns to work excited by what they have discovered about their writing, eager to apply what they have learned.

This will be accomplished through respect, and the earnest desire to help each writer improve his or her manuscript.

The more thoroughly you read the manuscripts of others, the better your own editorial eye will become.

Those who thoroughly apply themselves to the task of intelligent, careful criticism begin to appreciate how writers work. They uncover techniques, ideas, connections that invariably illuminate their own writing.

[Workshop participants tell me] that while it was interesting and helpful to receive responses to their own manuscript, what they garnered from the workshop process was the development of their own critical faculties. These gleanings of art and of craft, and above all the ability to criticize a manuscript effectively, will be applied, in the future to their own work.

Pay attention. Take care of each other. Use no adjectives that does not reveal something. Avoid abstractions. And have a great workshop.

Additional Resources:

• "Light a Candle" essay by Sands Hall published in Los Angeles Review of Books blog
• "Light the Candle of Freedom" song by Sands Hall