Archive for category Interact
Craft Chat: Race and Ethnicity
How do you make characters of a race (describing biological descent) or ethnicity (describing cultural heritage) other than your own realistic? How can you avoid reducing them to a stereotype? Where do you go for information? What obvious traps should you avoid?
We’ll be answering these questions and enjoying some free write time during our regular writers group meeting. Visitors are welcome! This is a free event.
Critique Workshop and Craft Chat
Date: Saturday, March 21, 2009
Times: 4 to 6:30 p.m.
Location: Meeting Room (directly across from circulation desk)
Chico Branch, Butte County Library
Address: 1108 Sherman Avenue, Chico
Agenda
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4-4:30 p.m. Free Write followed by Craft Chat
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4:30-6:30 p.m. Critique Workshop
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m.s.s in this order:
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D. H.
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R. A.
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L. H.*
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How NOT to be targeted by the evil #queryfail
Posted by Kathie in #queryfail, Interact, News, resources on March 6, 2009
Thursday, March 6, 2009
Yesterday various agents and editors got together on Twitter and posted a wild rash of reasons they will reject a query letter. If you haven’t read the 140 or less character tweets we collected, now would be a really good time.
How do you write a winning query letter that won’t be labeled “fail” by these editors, agents and interns working in publishing houses? We’ve collected a few really good articles that will help you get your foot in the door. Take a gander: (hint: click the links as they’ll take you directly to the article we’re referencing.)
- Mystery author, S. W. Hubbard, has a great article here: www.swhubbard.com
- Ester Heller, Editor-in-Chief, Targum Press posted the following guidelines Nov. 2008: http://blogs.targum.com
- A summation of yesterday’s #queryfail experiment and lessons learned can be found here at the Belletrinsic blog: http://belletrinsic.blogspot.com
- Tara Lazar did a summation, too, that’s worth perusing and can be found here: http://taralazar.blogspot.com
- Colleen Lindsay, the literary agent (FinePrint Literary Management) responsible for yesterday’s #queryfail, has a site crammed full of useful information to pick through. Start here: http://theswivet.blogspot.com and be sure to look around the site, it’s very useful!
- Jill Corcoran has a very well put together “how to write a query letter” post that’s very timely, too, as it was published on March 1st, 2009: http://jillcorcoran.blogspot.com Be sure to check out the posts she links to as well (run your cursor over the page to find the links which aren’t underlined). Bookmark the post as it is a great resource!
Still need more? Want a template of sorts? Short of sending out the monkeys to write it for you (and no, we won’t do that — didn’t you read yesterday’s capture of the #queryfail tweets?), Nathan Bransford with Curtis Brown LTD provides you with a great “Mad Lib” style query letter. Just be sure to change it up a bit so it’s more personalized! Go check it out at: http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2008/03/query-letter-mad-lib.html
If you have your own tips, winning recipe, experience to share, by all means, leave a comment! Good luck, too!
Resources – Dialect
The following is a list of resources for writing dialect. This goes in conjunction with today’s craft chat on dialect.
- Writing Dialect: It’s in the Rhythm by Cameron Michaels
- How to Avoid Writing Dialect in Plays
- Dialect Survey Maps – A collection of maps showing the regional variations in terms and pronunciations in the US.
- Writing Dialect in Fiction by Tony Burton – Contains several examples from classic literature.
- Using Dialect in Fiction by Jennifer Jensen – Another discussion of use of dialect.
- Writing Accents and Dialects by Charles Carson – Includes some caution that how you write accents and dialects may say more about you than about the characters.
- Write stuff: Avoid using dialect, phonetic spelling by Rusty Lang – Advice on using dialect and phonetic spelling in journalistic writing.
- The International Dialects of English Archive – "IDEA was created in 1997 as a free, online library of primary source recordings for the performing arts." Includes transcripts of the audio samples. Note: Each audio sample begins with the person reading a passage. You may want to skip past this to the unscripted speech.
- Internet Archive – Contains many freely available movies and audio recordings. May require some digging to find the dialect you’re looking for.
- radio-locator and Web-Radio – Search for radio stations; results will show you which ones you can listen to over the Internet. Both include search by state.
Interact: Weaving Events and Places
Stories can take place all within a matter of minutes or, span out over years, lifetimes. They can remain in the area of a square foot, encompass the entire planet, or reach far beyond into outer space or even beyond the mind. As the writer, you must chose how you want the story to unfold, where the characters are located and paint the picture so your audience can visualize the setting. Or, settings. You might want the reader to be far removed, looking down from the clouds as the characters move about. Or maybe you’d like the audience to be seated right next to your protagonist — possibly become the protagonist or, better yet, antagonist!
Recently a couple of our writing group members met for coffee. During the casual conversation, the discussion evolved to one about place and setting. How appropriate seeing our upcoming craft chat will be about just that: place and setting. The frustration one writer was experiencing was borne from moving rapidly back and forth in the story, jumping from one part of the nation to another, sometimes having events occurring simultaneously yet in different chapters. How, the question surfaced, do you keep your audience engaged? The idea of placing time and location stamps throughout the story was suggested.
What ideas do you have? What have you done in your own stories? What have you seen other authors do in similar situations? What worked for you or didn’t? Take a moment and share your thoughts by clicking on the comments link. Remember, your email address will not be published, however it is necessary; otherwise our spam detection bot will toss it into the trash.
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