The Art of Close Reading

"Improving as a reader is something you need to do to improve as a writer."

~ Jim Shepard

Award-winning novelist Jim Shepard shares his 5-step process of analyzing work towards the improvement of your own skills and craft as a writer--direct from the 2010 Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

Thank you to Dani Shapiro for her Twitter post!

These Women!

Join the Institute for Cultural Change  

for a once in a lifetime gathering to honor

"THESE WOMEN!"

June 24-26, 2011 - Santa Barbara, CA

Pat Berry, Lyn Cowan, Christine Downing, Nor Hall, Ginette Paris,

Hendrika de Vries, Mary Watkins, and Marion Woodman

See full details

You are invited to experience an extraordinary weekend of dialogue, exploration and dynamic conversation with these seminal voices. Their writings and teachings unleashed our imaginations, steeped our lives in symbolic understanding, and guided us in trusting our emerging feelings and knowings. Their life work has shaped and expanded Depth, Archetypal, and Jungian Psychology.

This gathering is designed to be interactive, giving the audience an opportunity to ask questions and share reflections on a few turning points in their own lives that have been meaningful.

Read the brief bios for these amazing women authors, thinkers and cultural shapers of this century. Your sponsorship of any one of these women will permit you to attend the event at no charge.

Creative Efficiency

Take care when analyzing and editing your creative work... you may cut out its very essence.  As Aristotle once said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Family Matters

FAMILY MATTERS

Tuesday, April 26th @ 7 p.m.

Diesel, A Bookstore

Brentwood Country Mart - 225 26th Street
Santa Monica 90402

Join memoir authors Jennifer Lauck (Blackbird, Found), Dinah Lenney (Larger than Life) and Hope Edelman (The Possibility of Everything, Motherless Daughters) as they read from their recent work and discuss the ups and downs, ins, outs, screeching halts and gymnastics involved in writing about family.

Find full details here

Script Frenzy

Have you ever wished there were a version of NaNoWriMo dedicated to scriptwriting?
There is! Script Frenzy!
 
Script Frenzy is an international writing event in which participants take on the challenge of writing 100 pages of scripted material in the month of April--screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, and graphic novels are all welcome. Every writer who completes the goal of 100 pages is victorious and awe-inspiring and will receive a handsome Script Frenzy Winner's Certificate and web badge proclaiming this fact.

Even those who fall short of the word goal will be applauded for making a heroic attempt. Really, you have nothing to lose-except that nagging feeling that there's a script inside you that may never get out.

30 days. 100 pages. April. Are you in?

P.S. Your NaNoWriMo user name works over at Script Frenzy.
 

Two Standout Memoirs - Hot Off the Press!

The month of March kicked off with a bang: two important memoirs have just been released, both written by special women who I've had the opportunity to get to know over the last year.

Meredith Baxter, most well-known for her popular role as Elyse Keaton on Family Ties, has emerged as a writer with her first book, Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering. Told with insight, wit, and disarming frankness, Untied is the eye-opening and inspiring life of an actress, a woman, and a mother who has come into her own.

Meredith's Book Signings in Los Angeles & San Francisco:

Vroman's Bookstore - Saturday, March 12th, 4pm
695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena 91101

Diesel, A Bookstore - Sunday, March 20th, 3pm
Brentwood Country Mart, 225 26th Street, Santa Monica 90402

Books Inc. in the Castro - Wednesday, March 23rd, 7:30 pm
2275 Market Street, San Franciso 94114

Then, in a follow up to her New York Times best-selling memoir Manic, Terri Cheney now shares her experience growing up with bipolar disorder in her new book The Dark Side of Innocence. By diving back into her own troubled childhood, Terri Cheney offers the first truly personal portrayal of this heartrending and controversial illness, which affects more than one million children.

Terri will be reading & signing books in the LA area:

Book Soup Bookstore - Wednesday, March 23rd, 7pm

8818 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 90069

Barnes & Noble Bookstore - Saturday, April 2nd, 2pm

Westside Pavillion (1st Floor), 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles 90064 

Memoirs Ink Essay Contest

Memoirs, Ink., is hosting its half-yearly writing contest. The purpose of the contest is to encourage others to write about their experiences and to give promising writers money to fund their writing habits. First prize is $1000 and publication at Memoirsink.com.

Guidelines:

Memoirs Ink. is looking for previously unpublished personal essays, memoirs, or stories that are based on autobiographical experiences. The narrative must be written in first person. Other that that, the contest is open to any type, genre or style of stories.

First Prize: $1000. Second Prize: $500. Third Prize: $250. 

Entry fee: $15.

Contest Deadline: February 15, 2011 (Postmark). Late Deadline March 1, 2011 (Requires additional $5) Winners will be announced April 30, 2011. Winners will be published at www.memoirsink.com.

Send entries to:
Memoirs Ink Writing Contest
10866 Washington Blvd., Ste. 518,
Culver City, CA 90232

Please limit entries to less than 1500 words.

Please submit entries as follows: Typed, double-spaced, 12 pt. font.

Please submit entries with Entry Form. Available here.

Questions? E-mail Jill

Upcoming Writing Workshops

 

 Kick-off your New Year with a Spirit of Story writing workshop!

MALIBU WRITING WORKSHOP
Come join us for a *FREE* sample session

Sunday, January 23rd, 2 - 4 p.m.
Held at a private home in Malibu
See full details

UNLOCKING YOUR STORY
Uncover, develop, and write your personal story

Jan 12th - March 2nd (Santa Monica)
8 Wednesday evenings, 7-10 p.m.

  March 8th - April 26th (Woodland Hills)
8 Tuesdays, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m.
See full details

Janet Fitch's Parenting Tips for Writers

For all you parents (or would-be, considering ones) out there, who are also writers and creators... Check out this post by Janet Fitch, author of best-selling White Oleander, among other titles. She offers some pointers on how parenthood and writing can successfully co-exist.

You might also happen to get hooked on Janet's blog!

SOS - kg

Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman

National Novel Writing Month  (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Each year participants begin writing November 1st. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30th. Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. In 2009, NaNoWriMo had over 165,000 participants. More than 30,000 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline.

With this year's NaNoWriMo just behind us, I am passing along this pep talk that Neil Gaiman wrote for the participants during Week Three. They are words, however, relevant to all writers—for anyone deeply involved in the creative process of a written work. Gaiman reminds us what it is to be a writer, and how novels (or any piece of writing for that matter) get written. Just when you were about to throw in the towel!

SOS ~ kg


Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you're probably ready to give up. You're past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You're not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You're in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more---and that even when they do you're preoccupied and no fun. You don't know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you're pretty sure that even if you finish it it won't have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began---a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read---it falls so painfully short that you're pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That's how novels get written.

You write. That's the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It's a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn't build it it won't be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm---or even arguing with me---she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, "Oh, you're at that part of the book, are you?"

I was shocked. "You mean I've done this before?"

"You don't remember?"

"Not really."

"Oh yes," she said. "You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients."

I didn't even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.

That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you'll be on the downward slide, and it's not impossible that soon you'll be at the end. Good luck...

Neil Gaiman

--
Neil Gaiman is the author of the New York Times bestselling children's book Coraline and of the picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. He is also the author of award-winning novels and short stories for adults, as well as the Sandman series of graphic novels. His most recent novels include InterWorld and Anansi Boys.

[Credit: See original post on NaNoWriMo.org]