What I learned from reading about 100 applications to the Fr Irwin Writing Workshop*
*which has been postponed while the Ateneo campus is in lockdown as a COVID-19 prevention measure. NO, WE ARE NOT ACCEPTING MORE APPLICATIONS.
1. People love romantic stories. No problem with that, except that they want to write the same stories over and over and over. I suppose it’s therapy: everyone wants to get over romantic disappointment by rewriting their history, but please, I beg you, give your characters a personality and a life. “A life” means there is more going on in their day-to-day existence than moping over their beloved, talking about their beloved, wondering if they should send a message to their beloved, and boring everyone into a coma about their beloved. All romances are similar, it’s the characters who make them interesting. No character, no point. I don’t want to read about relationships where the only problem is that they’re wimps (torpe).
Fact: In the great romances, the lovers are separated for all eternity by death or something else. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, we can go on for days. You want to write a great romance, be prepared to kill off one or both lovers.
2. Many entries began by musing tediously on the weather. If you want to live, do not begin a story with “It was a dark and stormy night” or some variation thereof. (“It was a warm and sunny day…when the applicant was disemboweled with a fountain pen.”)
3. Who starts an application letter with “Gud eve?” Do a little research on the person who is reading your letter.
4. Mothers, give your children the autonomy to submit their application themselves. You’re embarrassing them. You need to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
