Once a month for quite a few years now, I lead a fiction workshop. The cost is a $10 donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Will and Grundy Counties.
What makes this group different from the critique group I co-lead (WriteOn Joliet) is the opportunity to spend an intense several hours focusing on certain aspects of plot, world or character building, dialogue, etc.
For instance, we've spent several months working on character perspective or structured outlining. It mostly depends on the needs of the participants.
This past Friday was a jumble of topics all relating to a certain character in one man's novel.
Lats month, I realized this particular author, who has written and self-published many books, has never written a male protagonist, so I challenged him to consider it for a future book.
He arrived last week with an outline in hand for a novel that tells the back story of the brother of one of his protagonists. The brother is a Catholic priest, the adopted son of Russian immigrants who settled in Kansas, who has retired at age 65 and moved into his sister's house.
My first question was, "Why Kansas?"
The author had no concrete answer.
So while I was expressing my disbelief over Russian immigrants, who were most likely Eastern Orthodox, making their home and starting up a business in Kansas (all the while thinking that I should probably look this up), this author's wife, who also attends, did, in fact, pick up her phone and then laugh out loud.
She had found plenty of posts about the migration of Russian-Germans to Kansas. Most of these immigrants were not Easter Orthodox, but Christians of other faiths, largely (but not limited to) the Mennonite population.
Here is the first line (and a link, for the curious) from a post from the Kansas Historical Society.
ONE HUNDRED years ago several thousand German-speaking people from Russia settled on lands in Kansas and left a considerable impact upon the history of the state.
https://www.kshs.org/p/the-migration-of-the-russian-germans-to-kansas/13242
Then we also researched and discussed priest shortages, retirement age for priests (and the process for it), and the unlikely possibility that this pastor and parish priest simply "decided" to retire at age 65 and move into the house of his choice.
We've spent entire meetings (or good chunks of them) working on rural Scotland in the eighteenth century, how far boiling spaghetti sauce travels if left unattended in a pot, and the development of a rich female teen when the protagonist meets her for the first time by bumping into her.
It probably sounds like a lot of effort, and it is.
But the goal is to create a world and characters so seamless the reader forgets he's reading.
For the writer, this process is fun, informative, and it allows us to steep ourselves in this really lovely part of our imaginations.
And, at least once month, we get to steep ourselves in the building block imaginations of other writers.
What makes this group different from the critique group I co-lead (WriteOn Joliet) is the opportunity to spend an intense several hours focusing on certain aspects of plot, world or character building, dialogue, etc.
For instance, we've spent several months working on character perspective or structured outlining. It mostly depends on the needs of the participants.
This past Friday was a jumble of topics all relating to a certain character in one man's novel.
Lats month, I realized this particular author, who has written and self-published many books, has never written a male protagonist, so I challenged him to consider it for a future book.
He arrived last week with an outline in hand for a novel that tells the back story of the brother of one of his protagonists. The brother is a Catholic priest, the adopted son of Russian immigrants who settled in Kansas, who has retired at age 65 and moved into his sister's house.
My first question was, "Why Kansas?"
The author had no concrete answer.
So while I was expressing my disbelief over Russian immigrants, who were most likely Eastern Orthodox, making their home and starting up a business in Kansas (all the while thinking that I should probably look this up), this author's wife, who also attends, did, in fact, pick up her phone and then laugh out loud.
She had found plenty of posts about the migration of Russian-Germans to Kansas. Most of these immigrants were not Easter Orthodox, but Christians of other faiths, largely (but not limited to) the Mennonite population.
Here is the first line (and a link, for the curious) from a post from the Kansas Historical Society.
ONE HUNDRED years ago several thousand German-speaking people from Russia settled on lands in Kansas and left a considerable impact upon the history of the state.
https://www.kshs.org/p/the-migration-of-the-russian-germans-to-kansas/13242
Then we also researched and discussed priest shortages, retirement age for priests (and the process for it), and the unlikely possibility that this pastor and parish priest simply "decided" to retire at age 65 and move into the house of his choice.
We've spent entire meetings (or good chunks of them) working on rural Scotland in the eighteenth century, how far boiling spaghetti sauce travels if left unattended in a pot, and the development of a rich female teen when the protagonist meets her for the first time by bumping into her.
It probably sounds like a lot of effort, and it is.
But the goal is to create a world and characters so seamless the reader forgets he's reading.
For the writer, this process is fun, informative, and it allows us to steep ourselves in this really lovely part of our imaginations.
And, at least once month, we get to steep ourselves in the building block imaginations of other writers.
Illustration by Kathleen Rose Van Pelt for "Bryony."
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