The February 2018 prompt-a-month for our Writers in the Grove members is:
Describe what your favorite chair looks like – without ever using the word chair.
Writers in the Grove members may hand in their submissions during the workshops or use our members only submission form. Check out the guidelines and instructions for submissions in the announcement.
The Forest Grove City will be presenting a free morning writer’s workshop from 10:15am to noon, Saturday, February 17, 2018, with novelist Deborah Kennedy, author of Tornado Weather.
The topic for this free workshop is “The Writer’s Craft: Keys to Unlocking the Interconnected Narrative.”
While the event is free, you are encouraged to sign up by calling the Forest Grove City Library at 503-992-3247.
The library is located at 2114 Pacific Avenue, Forest Grove, OR 97116.
In “What I Learned Doing NaNoWriMo for the First Time” by Patrick Allen on Lifehacker, he describes the lessons he’s learned this year from participating in the annual writer’s challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
Most importantly, though, I learned that there is always time to create things. No matter how busy I was—with my full-time job, other writing projects, multiple weekend trips to San Diego, business trips to New York, running tables at multi-day conventions—there was always a little time to sit down and spill out some words for my story. I even managed to write on my birthday. Eat your heart out, Stephen King. NaNoWriMo, more than any other creative endeavor I’ve undertaken, gave me a serious lesson in time management. I knew that “finding” the time was never going to work. You don’t find time, you “make” time. But this challenge proved that concept for me tenfold, especially as the month dragged on and staying on track got harder and harder. Falling behind a little every day means being behind a lot near the end. If I didn’t write enough one day, I knew I’d have to make it up later, and that really became apparent in the second half of the month. There’s no doubt in my mind this lesson would not have sunk in the way it did for me had I given up after 10 days. You need the whole month.
We know this. This isn’t new, but the delivery system that is NaNoWriMo slams this lesson home in everyone who participates, no matter what happens, to complete the month.
Among those in Writers in the Grove who participated, even if for a week or so, it was fascinating to hear their excuses for not continuing on. For our group, members could participate in NaNoWriMo with the goal of 50,000 words, or 30 hours, one hour of writing a day. We have many writers who are poets and write by hand, so we changed the word count to a minimum one hour a day to create the same challenge as the word count.
For those who kept going until the end of the month, they reported:
Fascinating to compare these statements with the lesson in time management learned by Patrick Allen. It really boils down to the fact that you don’t find time, you make time. You make a commitment to yourself and you keep it.
Either way, for our members, there is no right or wrong. There are the lessons learned, and this is one of them. Whatever gets in your way during November’s NaNoWriMo challenge are the things that get in your way the rest of the year. That’s the real lesson.
What gets in your way? NaNoWriMo’s methodology is a great way to test your self-sabotaging techniques in a condensed month-long process. I’m the expert in self-sabotage when it comes to creative writing. Over the years of participating in NaNoWriMo, I’ve met many of my ghosts and demons and survived my personal mental torture chamber of self-doubt, and lived to tell about it. Surviving makes me a better writer, there is no doubt, but finishing makes me a better finisher.
Don’t despair because you didn’t finish or didn’t participate this year. You can NaNoWriMo any time, any month, or even across a single week. Set a goal. Keep it. And whatever you do, don’t stop writing.
…she stumbled and he caught her as she fell, sweeping her up in his – in his – what is that word? Darn it. You know the word. It means big, tough guy arms but not strong arms. Stereotype alert. What is that word? I had it a minute ago.
Happen to you?
It happens to everyone, especially writers. Sometimes I think our heads are so filled up with words, it’s like plunging your hand into an aquarium of tetras and hoping to catch just that one, you know, that one! The words slip right out of your brain.
The OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Thesaurus is here to help. It provides a free thesaurus and reverse dictionary look-up feature to help you overcome your brain farts, as we tend to call them.
I typed in the words “strong arms” and hit enter.
My choices were divided into All, Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, and Adjectives, each with multiple pages of suggestions. “Strong arms” matched with the definition of “enforce,” which made me realize that the web page service concluded I meant “strong-armed” rather than the description of a pair of strong arms. Still, there were words I could use. In Adjectives I found muscular, heavy-armed, solid, colossal, substantial, gigantic, healthy, great, heavy, heft, savage, and smothered. My favorite was bionic but it didn’t work in this instance. There were many other words that weren’t appropriate, but they did trigger more descriptive ideas such as blockading, huddled, swarming, and pressed.
Clicking the “More Definitions” button opened a new web page with variations on the word “enforce,” which wasn’t going in the right direction, but did show the capabilities of the service to help you track down the right word. It listed links to definitions on over 30 different alternative sources, giving me the opportunity to really dig into the meaning of a word.
OneLook isn’t the only reverse word lookup service on the web. Experiment with The Reverse Dictionary and Reverse Word Search-Lookup by Wordsmyth.
And good luck with those word slippages.
I was surprised during our weekly Writers in the Grove free Monday workshop meeting that some of my fellow members didn’t know about the concept of world building in writing.
When you write fiction, you create a world, literally. It may represent the real world or a fantasy world. It consists of scenes, places where events occur in your story.
Your fictional world is made up of places, people, cultures, traditions, habits and routines, weather, geology, current events, and politics.
I’m working on a story that takes place in 1979. I begin my world building by researching historical events in 1979, then branch into newsworthy stories and topics, and even some trivia. If my story is concentrated solely in the United States, and specifically a location, say Seattle, then most of my research would focus on what happened in Seattle in and around 1979. Here are some of the results of my web search.
In my research, I discover that the average income that year in the United States was $17,500, and the average monthly rent was $280, a far cry from today’s prices. A gallon of gas cost 86 cents, oil was $24 a barrel, and the Toyota Corolla was one of the most popular cars on the road and the $200 Sony Walkman was in demand by most teenagers and college students. Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album won awards and played out of boomboxes everywhere, blasting “Y.M.C.A.” by The Village People off the charts. The daily news included updates on Voyager 1 as it made its closest pass by Jupiter, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Moral Majority religious movement by Jerry Falwell, 63 American hostages taken in Iran, and Saddam Hussein becoming president of Iraq. John McEnroe, Tracy Austin, Bjorn Borg, and Martinia Navratilova became household names as tennis champions. We watched MASH, The Jeffersons, The Dukes of Hazzard, One Day at a Time, and Three’s Company on television. The big screen played Alien, All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Start Trek: The Motion Picture, Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, Being There, Life of Brian, Mad Max, and the Muppet Movie.
If you are writing about 1979, this is the world your characters lived in. They listened to that music, watched that news, those movies, and said funny things like quotes from movies and television such as “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” (Brooke Shields ad for Calvin Klein), “Reach out and touch someone” (AT&T ad), “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Apocalypse Now), and “You need this for your rent, boy” (Richard Pryor).
Cultural stories might filter into conversations or even the thoughts of your characters such as when then-President Jimmy Carter explained how he almost tipped when an enraged swamp rabbit swam toward his fishing boat, or comment on the first time a milk carton featured a picture of a missing child. Or the fears that swept the globe as NASA’s Skylab fell to Earth, landing in Australia, made fun of afterwards by many when the Shire of Esperance in Western Australia fined NASA $400 for littering. Or maybe how Charles Manson sent a Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card in a humorous attempt to be released by the parole board. Or maybe the dinner table discussion that night might be about the work of Mother Teresa after she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The world your characters live in influences their personalities, behaviors, even habits. A worker in 1979 living and/or working in downtown Seattle would have made sure they made a swing by Starbucks at 1912 Pike Place for a cup of their soon-to-be-famous coffee.
Now think about your characters and their relationship to this place and this time. Are all of your characters from here? Or maybe one or more of them are from different places, creating conflict when their worlds come together such as a white woman from Seattle falling in love with a black man from Mississippi in 1958, or the reverse. What about a new immigrant from Europe or Africa landing on the shores of the United States or Canada in the 1800s? Or maybe you have a person from Germany finding their way in Alabama in 1943 at the height of World War II? When we travel, we bring our worlds with us no matter where we go.
Your story may begin in any time and place. The world existed for your characters before the start of your story, and they might survive your story. Reveal the world they live in, as well as the world of history and experiences they carry with them through your story, to your readers as they shake hands and get to know your characters.
Here are a list of questions to help you define the world in which your characters live.
This is just a few of the questions to consider. Go through these, and the questions and suggestions offered in the resources below, then ask yourself: Could this scene happen anywhere else? How would it change? How would it change the characters? How would it change the story? See what happens.
One last bit of advice.
If you introduce something new to the world in which your characters live, ask yourself if this change their world. How does it? If it is magic or technology, does it impact only your characters or everyone in society? How? Why? Is it good, bad, or indifferent? How do they adapt to the change? is it good for everyone or just a few?
Remember, your characters live in the test tube of your imagination. Every twist or turn in the story may create a tsunami of change beyond the bubble that is your main characters. Let your readers see and feel the change.
The following is by Writers in the Grove member, Gretchen Keefer.
Raise or rise up? While both of these verbs indicate upwards motion, the difference is in “what” is going up.
Rise, rose, risen: No objects go up. The subject of the sentence is the only thing moving towards the ceiling or sky. The action stays with the subject only.
Gary rose slowly from the recliner and left the room.
Heat rises.
The sun and moon rise daily.
Joe has risen through the ranks to make CFO at a young age.
Raise, raised, raised: Now, something is going up! “Raise” needs an object to lift or nurture, as in the case of children, crops, and animals. Ask the question “Raise what?” and fill in the blank.
The following is by Writers in the Grove member, Gretchen Keefer.
Which do you do?
Set, set, set: This verb is so busy placing objects in various locations, it has no time to alter its tenses.
“Set” wants something to do. There is always a “what” after “set” such as set the table, set your hair, set goals.
After setting her purse on the table, Joan read the mail.
Have you set a date with that cute guy yet?
Set down the knife and raise your hands.
Sit, sat, sat, not standing. Actually, not doing anything. There is no “what” after sit, just a rest from working. No motion, nothing is going anywhere or doing anything. There could be another verb in “-ing” form, and you may use adjectives to describe the length, location, or style of the sit, but no objects follow “sit.”
Gary did not sit long on Janice’s couch. He preferred sitting in the recliner. While sitting there, he fell asleep. Janice sat thinking about Gary. How often has he sat on her recliner sleeping? He never would set a wedding date. Obviously this relationship is going nowhere–
The following is by Writers in the Grove member, Gretchen Keefer.
Dessert is luscious, and often “sickeningly sweet” — hence the two “ss” in dessert.
The desert is too dry to support more than one “s.”
Shift the accent on desert – the place – and you have desert, the action.
The legionnaire de-SER-ted his post in the DES-ert.
Writers in the Grove, a Forest Grove community creative writing group, presents a 4-week workshop for writers called “Scrivener Basics Workshop.” It runs for 4 week and begins on Thursday, September 21, 2017, from 6:30 – 9:00 PM at the Forest Grove Community and Senior Center in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Dream of writing your memoirs? A novel? That story that’s been nagging you for years?
Scrivener is a “complete writing studio” to help you from idea to final draft. It holds all your ideas, research, and writing in one place, keeping you focused and on track to publishing. It is the affordable writer’s tool that inspires and helps you write that book.
This 4-week workshop covers the basics of Scrivener including imports, organization and layout of your writing, keeping on task, research, and the basics you need to know.
Scrivener offers a free trial version. You will need to download and install the program prior to the first night of class. Prior publishing experience not required. Familiarity with computers is essential.
Normally these courses are well over $200. As a fundraiser for the Forest Grove Community and Senior Center, the instructor is making this 4-week course available for only $100 with the proceeds benefiting the center.
Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress has been using and teaching workshops and classes on Scrivener for over seven years. Her workshops are educational as well as entertaining. Lorelle has published several books prior to using Scrivener, and many since discovering the writing software program, and it changed her life and her writing. Lorelle has been teaching web publishing, social media, WordPress, and blogging for almost thirty years. Lorelle has also published many tutorials on Scrivener on this site for members and fans of Writers in the Grove and NaNoWriMo.
Bring a copy of a story or collection of stories you’ve written in a word processing program like Microsoft Word on your computer or a flash drive. We will be learning how to import into Scrivener.
You will need to bring your laptop, power cord, mouse (with extra batteries), and something to write on and take notes. You will log into the free WIFI at the Center so ensure you know how to do this before you arrive, or arrive early to get help getting online. It is highly recommended that you bring a water bottle, too. There is plenty of free parking at the center.
There is limited space for this special event so register now to guarantee a seat.
More information, contact the Forest Grove Community and Senior Center.
Register in person or by check or phone with the Forest Grove Community Center: 503-357-2021.
Image Credit: Autostraddle
The fairly new Washington County Writers Forum in Hillsboro, Oregon, will be hosting a Writers Forum event on June 1, 2017, at Insomnia Coffee from 7-8pm. Insomnia Coffe is at 317 E. Main Street in downtown Hillsboro. Suggested admission is $5.
Jessica Morrell is a fabulous author, speaker, and instructor from the Portland area. She offers regular educational workshops for fiction and memoir writers around the area, and speaks at many conferences. She will be covering the writing process from “flash to finish” in this program titled “From Idea to Story.”
Writers in the Grove welcomes the Washington County Writers Forum to our writing community and look forward to some excellent workshops and programs.
Writers in the Grove 