Archive for the ‘Workshops’
One down, three more Writing Workshops to go.
We just finished our Short Story Writing Workshop at Ayala Museum last night. The workshop took place over three night sessions and consisted of lectures, with participants reading what they’d written so far. The goal was to finish a short story by the end of the workshop, and nearly everyone completed their drafts. (The rest will be laughed at not be taken seriously until they cough up finished product.)
The Story Writing Workshop went well, so we’re going to do three more for the rest of the year. The schedule (to be confirmed):
July 9, 16, and 23: Personal Essay Writing Workshop. Lectures, discussions, homework. For people who are working on memoirs, travel essays, and other autobiographical pieces.
September 3, 10, and 17: Creative Writing Workshop. Participants do 3 or 4 writing exercises per session. It’s like mental parkour.
October 15, 22, and 29: Advanced Story Writing. Readings, discussions, exercises. At the start participants should already have a draft, which will be taken apart in the sessions.
Sessions are held at the Ayala Museum from 630 to 830pm.
For more information, visit the Ayala Museum Facebook page or join their mailing list, education@ayalamuseum.org.
D.I.Y. Writing Workshop tip #3
If you’re serious about writing, start looking at the world through this frame: Everything is material.
Your train is ten minutes late—why? That’s material. Your boss yells at you for a missed deadline while you are hypnotized by a stain on his awful tie that looks like lipstick—whose? That’s material. The guard lets everyone in the mall without looking, but inspects every inch of your bag—Is it your outfit? That’s material. Suddenly, everything is interesting. The most random, mundane things are charged with potential.
If everything just looks the same to you, forget it.
D.I.Y. Writing Workshop Tips
Find your Discomfort Zone: the subject that makes you uncomfortable and squeamish, that you don’t want to discuss because you’re afraid people will judge you.
Now pitch a tent there. It is the most fertile place for writing, plus it’s free psychotherapy.
If you thought we meant camping, literally, forget about writing. It requires many levels of meaning, and you perceive only one.
Do-It-Yourself Writing Workshop
If you want to write, but don’t know how to get started, and lack either the time or the temperament for a writing workshop, here’s a fast-track D.I.Y. Writing Workshop.
1. Choose the writer whose style you envy the most and wish to emulate. Not necessarily your favorite, most beloved writer, but the writer you want to sound like.
2. Pick a story or novel by this writer.
3. Copy it out in longhand. Every word and punctuation mark, exactly. Through this process you “reenact” the process by which the writer created the work and get insights as to how the structure came about.
The slower version is to read the writer’s work over and over again, until you have absorbed the writer’s rhythms. It’s a lot like listening to an album of songs a hundred times—you’ll realize that you’ve memorized every word, pause, drum fill and riff without meaning to.
When we read a work of fiction, we hear a voice in our head. This is the voice of the work. It does not necessarily sound like the author as heard in old interviews; it is the sound of the narrator addressing the reader directly. If you hear that voice repeatedly, you will get its rhythms and tonalities. First, you will try to replicate them. Later, when you have written a lot and figured out what your own style is, you will adapt them to your requirements. You may even ditch them altogether as they have served their purpose.
In lieu of writing workshops, we read the work of J.D. Salinger repeatedly, not to memorize the books but because we really enjoyed them.
Occasionally we get emails from students writing about our work (Thanks). They ask where we were born and what our lousy childhood was like and how our parents were occupied and all before they had us. Fine, biographical information may be useful, but to really understand, they only need to look closely at the work. The work should be allowed to speak for itself.
This is the first line of the first real short story we ever wrote.
This is the first line of The Catcher in the Rye.
Can you hear it?
Now here’s the first sentence of the short story that got us noticed by the literary grownups.
And here’s the first line of Salinger’s story Teddy, collected in Nine Stories.
Always acknowledge your debts to previous writers. It’s not as if you could hide them.
Read The Man in the Woods, a creepy story by Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived In The Castle) at The New Yorker. There’s a cat in it.
Read our column, Cat People at InterAksyon.com.
Workshop Reading Lists
Technically not related to this post, but Game of Thrones is related to everything.
For our workshop participants (and anyone interested in reading along): Some books you could look up for research, comparison and direction. Excuse the oversimplified descriptions of your works in progress.
Crime thriller set in 19th Century Manila
– For style, the psychological thrillers (romans durs) of Georges Simenon, especially Dirty Snow, The Engagement, The Widow.
– Blair and Robertson’s massive The Philippine Islands is available at Project Gutenberg
– Accounts of foreign visitors to the Philippines, inc. Schadenburg and Jean Mallat
Science-fiction: Alternate history
– The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
– The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
– The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
– The Separation, Christopher Priest
– Watchmen, Alan Moore
Urban chaos short stories with gay themes
– Patty Diphusa, Pedro Almodovar
– A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund White
– Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin
– The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
A social comedy set in the film industry
– Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West
– Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Steven Bach
– Watch Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
– Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
A social comedy about relationships and marriage
– Jane Austen and her descendants
– Anything by Laurie Colwin
– The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
– After Claude, Iris Owens
Science-fiction: Cyberpunk, Dystopian future
– Neuromancer, William Gibson
– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
– Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
An existential crisis/search for meaning novel
– Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
– My Dark Places, James Ellroy
A coming-of-age novel of ideas and clashing philosophies
– Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
– Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Seymour, J.D. Salinger
– The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Science-fiction: Future society with individuals who possess unusual gifts
– Dune, Frank Herbert
– The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
– The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick
Comic meta-novel about fame and social media, told by a writer who can’t finish anything
– Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer
– The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh
– The Comforters, Muriel Spark
A coming-of-age novel about love, sex, responsibility
– The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
– I Conquer the Castle, Dodie Smith
– The Hotel New Hampshire/The World According to Garp, John Irving
A novel about family, the past, and the instability of memory
– The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes
– The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
– A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
A novel about friendship, betrayal, memory
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– The Old School, Tobias Wolff
– The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
– Atonement, Ian McEwan
A novel about travel and sexual awakening
– Platform, Michel Houellebecq
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer
A coming-of-age novel set in a small town populated with eccentrics
– Dubliners, James Joyce
– Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
– Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
– There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
– The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart
A fantasy novel about aswang and an alternate history of the Philippines
– The Philippine Islands, Blair and Robertson (Search the Index)
– The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson
– America’s Boy, James Hamilton-Paterson
Dante’s Inferno transposed to Metro Manila
– Obviously
– Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
– Vermilion Sands, J.G. Ballard
Filipino translation of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
– Read the Sherlock stories over and over till you get their rhythm.
– Interviews on translation with Pevear/Volokhonsky
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
