What we're doing in class: Advanced Year of Your Book

John Truby, who writes about screenwriting, has a theory that a scene should be shaped like this:

From Truby, The Anatomy of Story

In yesterday's class, we talked about the beautiful "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" Gabriel García Márquez.

Look at the first paragraph, which is also a complete scene. Does it have that shape? 

Also notice how much it does in 166 words. As novelists we can be tempted to think we need whole chapters to get the reader located in terms of time, place, what matters to the characters, and what the central themes and problems will be. I would argue García Márquez does that all in this one paragraph:

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

From "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" Gabriel García Márquez.

Odilon Redon, Aged Angel, 1903

What we're doing in class: "I Am Not a Real Writer": Some short memoirs

The title of my Saturday class, "I Am Not a Real Writer" at HVWC, is meant to bring in people who THINK this about themselves. The truth is everyone who writes is a writer, and if you're writing about things that really matter to you-- whether it's in the form of memoir, journalism, or stories about aliens-- then you're doing something worthwhile. 

This one has turned out to be sort of a memoir class, because that's what the people in it are interested in. As promised, here are some more short pieces we've been talking about. 


Marlon James, "One Day I Will Write About My Mother"

Dylan Thomas, "A Child's Christmas in Wales"

Alexander Chee, "Mr. and Mrs. B"

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And here's a good recent list: "15 Short Memoirs"

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This past Saturday, we spent a bit of time on "My Family's Slave" by Alex Tizon, and talked about approaching subjects around which we as writers feel guilt, shame, or conflicted emotions. Class members brought pages of their own writing to read aloud, dealing with this theme.

What We're Doing in Class: "I Am Not a Real Writer"

"I Am Not a Real Writer" is for people who've wanted to take a writing class but have been concerned about knowing how to do it "right."

Unsurprisingly (to me) everyone in this class is writing wonderful stuff. They are all 100% real.

They're leaning towards memoir, and we've been exploring this prompt. It involves being assigned a random phrase and using it as a jumping-off point for a memory. The phrase/image doesn't actually have to be part of your memory, as long as it brings it to mind. For example, one person got the phrase "half a cake" which brought up a memory of someone who temporarily disappeared-- even though there was no actual cake present at the time. Try it!

We're also reading some short memoirs, which I'll post over the coming days. I usually teach fiction, so it's a pleasure to explore this form.

Here's one for today: "One Day I Will Write About My Mother" by Marlon James. This shows how the difficulty in writing about a particular subject can become part of the piece itself-- one of the things it's about.

Mikhail Vrubel, Pencils, 1905