RANT 'O THE WEEK:
NaNoWriMo: by WritersCollege.com Director Stephen Morrill
NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month, something sponsored by the Office of Letters and Light and an annual get-psyched event. I was told about it by Judith Burnett Schneider, who used to teach for us but we lost her. Judith recruited me into this year's effort and may God have mercy on my soul.
Here's the deal: Write a novel (50,000 words worth, anyway) in the month of November. It can be any sort of novel. (I suppose you could write a nonfiction book, it's not like they know or care. It's the idea of cranking out almost 1700 words per day, every day, for 30 days, that's the point. I set a goal of 2000 words per day and so far I'm slightly ahead of the curve. Speaking of which, there really is a curve, a graph chart that tracks your progress against the minimum needed.
This is the tenth year for this and they expect more than 150,000 people to participate. There is a separate track for kids and school classes. It's free to participate—though they beg for money in a mild sort of way which I, for one, ignore—and they do not own your words or novel. All you risk in signing on is the everlasting shame of failing to carry through, and you're the only one to know that.
You write each day and post your word count for that chart. At the end you upload a file and they do an official word count (but they don't keep the file, they just need it for the word count), they send pep-talk messages to keep you going and you may have "writing buddies" and even socialize with fellow writers in your town who are part of the project too. In my home town of Tampa, there were almost 700 people signed up this morning!
I am halfway through a fantasy novel and assumed that I could cheat and just plug that into the system, get a sort of head start. No, their web site states that the penalty for doing that is death. So, since fantasies are written in series, and since I have outlined four books already, I just decided to write book #2 in the series, even though #1 is not finished. So far I'm on track, word-count-wise but it's only Day Two.
If you wish to jump aboard (or if you are already participating in NaNoWriMo) do so and tell me and I'll log you on as one of my writing buddies for the month. Email me with your NaNoWriMo sign-in name and get started! Time's a-wastin'!
To sign up for NaNoWriMo, click here.
To become my NaNoWriMo writing buddy, click here and tell me your NaNoWriMo screen name.
SCHOOL
NEWS: No new courses this week. Maybe next week. Stay tuned. I'll list all our latest additions below. Check them out in more detail at the Catalogs page:
Article Writing with Usha Sliva: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see your article and name appear in Cosmopolitan or Flair; Entrepreneur or Newsweek? The pride and joy is indescribable. And the pay, not bad! Learn how to become an accomplished article writer and pitch your work to magazines of your choice. It’s all in the writing, selling and presentation and this course will teach you step by step, how handle each one of them.
These are new courses too, having been added in the past month:
Experimental Fiction Joining the Dialogue with Tantra Bensko: If you enjoy the idea of pushing beyond the boundaries of ordinary fiction, this course will allow you to play, and to forge new directions in literature which remain compelling for the reader. You will also consider how you fit into the history and ongoing presentation of experimental fiction, delve into new parts of your psyche, and start making connections with magazines.
Publish Your Writing Creative Writing that Creates Income!with Ned McIntosh: This course offers a series of progressive one-page Teaching Guides of the crafts of writing and submitting, leading up to the specific goals of submitting works for publication. The course should help determine whether the student has both the talent and drive necessary to become a published author.
FEATURED
COURSES: (Also see our homepage for daily featured courses)
Essays and Personal Stories: This is a class for any writer who is motivated to write short pieces based on his or her personal experiences, explorations, dreams, longings, emotions, thoughts, and/or ideas. These pieces can be targeted to magazines or complied into a book.
Flash Fiction: Flash fiction, when crafted with care, works within the boundaries of the genre and on the periphery of traditional storytelling. In the world of flash, a compelling story can be told in fewer than a hundred words!
Nonfiction Book Proposals: The best kept secret to marketing nonfiction books is that you don’t have to write the entire book. In this course, you will learn about all of the elements that need to be included in a book proposal and how to put them together for maximum effect on the agent and/or editor, setting you on the path to signing a contract with a publisher.
Shadow Writing: Are you curious about writer’s block (a myth), the dreams, longings, cravings, obsessions, and needs that distract you from your writing because of the strength of their grip? Do you suspect that there are depths that you can’t quite reach in your writing for fear of turning up something unpleasant? In this class, we will turn toward these things. Step on the accelerator and move into one of the darkest places you’ve ever been as a writer—your own unconscious.
Web Presence for Writers: Develop a basic knowledge of the internet, how it functions, how web sites are made, and the steps necessary to build your own web site. Learn how easy it is to have your web presence!
ESSAY: What is the Dialogue of Experimental Literature?
by Tantra Bensko
Tantra teaches Experimental Fiction for WritersCollege.com
What is Experimental Literature? What is traditional literature? At the time it is written, most literature pushes beyond the style of writing that precedes it. It's naturally different from the era that went before. Post-Modernist works very consciously exhibit more progressive aspects than even Modernist works.
Sometimes the specific piece of writing is different from everything, and is on the cutting edge of innovation in style, technique, structure, use of language, concepts of consciousness explored, what constitutes a plot, characters, allowable subject matter, presentation, or something else unexpected. The works on the forefront of breaking apart the complacent, and routine ways of looking at literature and life itself are generally the most experimental. They are often eccentric, quirky, even puzzling, and not necessarily to the taste of the mainstream, at least at the time.
Knowing the rules of what pushed the previous rules before and thus became "traditional," and what experiments have been done already, and what is waiting to be explored is useful for writers who want to make their writing win a place in the history of literature. Even looking into this briefly can be very helpful and inspiring.
Literature that is innovative generally is read by people who have a propensity to read other innovative literature, at least the most famous, and so they will naturally place what they are reading in that context. Often new work comments on the tradition in some way, so just a change in structure, for example, can be an ironic twist that is more meaningful if we know what it's a twist on.
Each new meaningful difference that causes excitement in the readership puts the writer's voice in the dialogue of experimental fiction. This ongoing dialogue may be more important than many writers realize, who feel they can forge ahead without knowing anything of what went before. This sometimes works, for sure, but developing a personal manifesto that grounds your innovation in a rationale based on some study of the dialogue of experimentation may provide a richer context to reference the avant-garde writing. Being able to describe what it is, perhaps in essays about literary theory, helps readers understand.
In most cases of great literature, the writing could potentially be considered experimental, because the authors are forging new ways of looking at reality, if literary art is the ambition. Genre novels more likely go by formulas and stay within the status quo, and, often, sell quite well while doing so, entertaining many a reader warmly and thoroughly. Many, many people are far happier with romance novels and Westerns, mysteries, and mainstream fiction. Many people scratch their heads at experimental work, or see it as pretentious, or inadequate.
Experimental fiction isn't everyone's cup of tea. But perhaps it's the messy tea that deposits leaves in the bottom for the Tea Reader Lady to see the future in.
Click here to read the full essay.
Click here to learn more about Tantra Bensko's course in Experimental Fiction
WEB LINKS:
Here's a scary one: Ten Internet Crimes you may be committing.
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