Master Class: Character in Fiction and Nonfiction

Successful Characterization with Tracy Daugherty

Tracy Daugherty

1 – 5 p.m. Friday, October 30

at the Writers’ League office

611 S. Congress Ave., Suite 130

$99 members / $159 nonmembers

One way to think about successful characterization in either fiction or nonfiction is to say that characters work best when they match the narrative situation. That is, in the short-hand that is literary craft, everything they do illustrates their core qualities and values. Within the narrative parameters you have established, everything about the character’s nature is clear to the reader.

Instructor and  acclaimed author Tracy Daugherty will help explore strategies for creating successful characters in a narrative, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. Together the class will write and share work and ideas, and the instructor will provide published examples of characterization. The class will be in a lecture/discussion format.

Students will learn:

• a firm concept of characterization
• a sense of effective dialogue in fiction and nonfiction
• an understanding of tone, as it relates to characterization
• strategies for developing narrative situations that effectively illustrate character
• an understanding of how to build story from character, rather than the other way around

Interested? Register here.

Book in a Month: Novel Writing Tool Kit

Novel Writing Online Class with Kit Frazier

Kit Frazier

Self study, online course

starts Oct. 26 – Nov. 30, 2009

$149 WLT members / $209 nonmembers

Just in time for National Novel Writing Month! Whether you’re thinking about writing a novel or mired in the middle of your work in progress, this is the class for you. The intensive course of study reviews Christopher Vogler’s The Hero’s Journey’s three-act structure and Debra Dixon’s Goal, Motivation, and Conflict: The Building Blocks of Good Fiction, and breaks these concepts down into a manageable, 30-day writing regimen, with particular emphasis on those all-important first five pages and middle-of-the-story conflict.

The Book in a Month Tool Kit includes:

• PowerPoint Videos of Class Instruction
• Personal Goal Tracker Calendar
• Character Worksheets
• Character Goal, Motivation & Conflict Sheets
• Story Board Worksheets
• Time Tracker Worksheets

Instructor Kit Frazier will provide daily encouragement to students and host Friday online brainstorming chats. Students will also have the opportunity to share work in small online groups. Bonus! Students who complete their novel by November 30 will receive a discount on an entry in the 2010 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest.The Manuscript Contest has nine categories, and each category winner receives a complimentary consultation with an agent at the 2010 Writers’ League of Texas Agents Conference on June 26.

The Craft of Writing

Kathleen Allen-Weber

Ann McCutchan

Choosing the Writing Life: Art and Practice with Kathleen Allen-Weber & Ann McCutchan

Saturday, September 12, 10a.m. – 5p.m.

Whether you are thinking about becoming a writer or living the writer’s life but desperate for a booster shot, this six-hour intensive workshop offers the ideas, tools and inspiration for turning desire into flow, and flow into finished manuscripts. Team-taught by essayist, journalist and three-book author Ann McCutchan, a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas, and licensed therapist and writer Kathleen Allen-Weber, Ph.D., “Choosing the Writing Life” addresses the three critical components of the writer’s way: awareness, commitment, and practice.

Topics include:

• developing self-knowledge
• building technique
• seizing ripe opportunities

Don’t miss out on this workshop. To register for, click here!

Summer Writing Retreat Submission: John Doherty

Koen's Class at the Summer Writing Retreat

John Doherty has been writing fiction off and on since he was a kid (lately more “off” than “on,” unfortunately). John attended Karleen Koen’s Something Novel workshop at the 2009 Summer Writing Retreat in Alpine. This character sketch is based on a rather curmudgeonly fellow John spotted while having dinner one evening at the Gulf Station Café in Alpine. John lives in Austin with his wife and two young children. He can be reached by email at dohertyjt@me.com or through twitter @jtdoherty.

Character Sketch-Doherty

by John Doherty

In 1953, when Vernon Hicks was 11 years old, he’d been out a bird hunt in southern Kansas with his daddy and younger brother, Will.  All of seven years old, it was Will’s first hunt and his daddy intended to make sure the boy knew how to properly carry and fire a shotgun.

On the second day of the hunt and with dusk quickly approaching, Vernon caught site of a mess of birds lighting in the trees on the far side of the tank. Vernon raised his shotgun and let go with a blast of buckshot toward the top of the tree line.  This did nothing more than send the birds flying across the tank, shotguns flinging into the air to try and get ahead of them.  Unskilled as he was, and in the excitement of potentially getting the first dove of his young life, Will swung his shotgun rapidly to the left and fired.  The shotgun blast never made it more than a few feet, hitting Will’s daddy in the neck and killing him instantly.

Will and Vernon had stayed there near that tank with their daddy, sobbing over his dead body for hours, their clothes turning from shades of olive and beige to blackish crimson.  Vernon couldn’t bring himself to say anything at all to his younger brother, his heart

Opinionated: The Art and Craft of Op-Ed Commentary

A Master Class with Journalist, Evelyn C. White

9am – 1pm, Saturday, March 14

Writers’ League of Texas, 611 S. Congress Ave., Suite 130, Austin

Registration is still open!

Commentary is a perfect microcosm for exploring nonfiction writing. Journalist, Evelyn C. White, will lead students in producing a 600- to 700-word op-ed that can be submitted to newspapers following the class. Students are encouraged to bring an idea and a self-addressed, stamped envelope addressed to a newspaper. $99 WLT members; $159 nonmembers.

Don’t miss Evelyn’s other Austin appearances:

• International Women’s Day Lecture at UT, 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 11, Main Building, Room 212 (free)
• Talk on Alice Walker’s life and impact and book signing at BookWoman at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 15

Attention, Screenwriters!

Screenwriters won’t want to miss a free event in Austin on February 17: “Hollywood vs. New York: Three Writers’ Perspectives,” with Shauna Cross, Owen Egerton, and Stephen Harrigan.

The event is presented by the Future Forum and the Texas Book Festival. For details and information on reservations, here’s a link.

Good Query Letters

Chuck Sambuchino, the editor of The Guide to Literary Agents,
offers tips on sites with samples of good query letters. Here’s an excerpt:

• Query Shark. This site is devoted entirely to evaluating queries. they come in, and agent Janet Reid tears apart the bad ones and tells you why they’re bad. The good thing here is that you get a lot of examples. The bad thing here is that most of them are not up to snuff, according to the Shark; however, she does praise some of them.

• Agent Nathan Bransford’s Anatomy of a Query Letter Part I, then don’t forget about Part II.

• BookEnds Literary is starting to post some of their successful query letters online. See the first one here. [Note: Oddly enough, this refers to our WLT friend Karen MacInerney's query letter!]

Chuck, who appeared at the 2008 WLT Agents & Editors Conference, is a great observer of the publishing industry, and his blog is worth bookmarking. Check it out.

2009 Manuscript Contest

Deadline: March 6, 2009

The Writers’ League of Texas is now accepting entries for its annual manuscript contest for unpublished fiction, creative nonfiction, children’s, and young adult books.

Prize: The winner in each category meets individually with an agent or editor during the annual Writers’ League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference.

For guidelines and more information, view the 2009 Manuscript Contest brochure (pdf format).

Announcing the “Building a Book” Program Series

The Writers’ League of Texas opens the book on a new year with “Building a Book,” a yearlong series of monthly programs in which authors and publishing professionals explore how a book evolves.

Guilty as Charged: Cyndi’s Writing Confession

Okay, remember how I SWORE I was committing to my writing practice in conjunction with National Novel Writing Month? Well, here’s my confession about the best intentions:

• Nov. 1 & 2: Texas Book Festival (for me, it’s nonstop from Friday through Sunday night)
• Nov. 3 & 4: Let’s see, what was happening on those two days? Oh, that’s right, our national obsession finally culminated! (Note: I did post a blog entry on my personal blog about waiting for the election results)
• Nov. 5-8: The nastiest bout of creeping crud took over and knocked me down big time! I even had a temperature of 100.5 the night I was supposed to host my first write-in.

So, gulp, I’m here to ‘fess up and admit I’ve blown the first week of NaNoWriMo. But here’s the beautiful thing about writing: You can always just sit down and WRITE again. Just take it one day at a time. Today, I worked on my query letter and wrote two blog entries.

Now that I’m back at it, I’d like to invite any of you Austin NaNoers and WLT members who could use an hour or two of writing time to join use this Thursday, Nov. 13, for these League-hosted write-ins:

• I’ll be at from at Genuine Joe Coffeehouse, 2001 Anderson Lane, with laptop fired up from 7 to 9 p.m.!
• Cliff Avery hosts from 1 to 3 p.m. at Blue Marble Java Coffeehouse, 1912 W. Pecan in Pflugerville.
  
• Diane Hernandez will be writing away at Thunderbird Coffeehouse, 1401 Koenig Lane, from 7 to 9 p.m.

For those of you who aren’t in Austin, write wherever you are during those times. And please let us know how it’s going!

Write on!