author – CA Work Experience Program

Day 8- Dance With Me in Autumn Leaves

Today, I received a lot of wonderful resources from Ms. Bossen, especially about character creation. Basically, she suggests viewing characters as their own planets with layers that define them, like the earth has. For example, the crust is how you present yourself to the world with fashion choices, geographical location and such. As you get closer to the center, you get closer to the core of the character. There were also other exercises including writing a monologue and a dream journal from the perspective of a character. So, I began brainstorming and started drafting a short play with the working title of Dance With Me in Autumn Leaves, a ghost story of sorts. The plot is a bit confusing, but it’s about two girls who meet in a foggy meadow at midnight. The time period is undetermined, except for that it’s long enough ago that they would both realistically be wearing long white nightgowns. Here’s an excerpt of a scene that I wrote today, which as of now is the beginning of the play.

(Lights come up on a lone girl in a nightgown standing center stage clutching a basket filled with flowers and stones. This is EMMICA, a quiet young woman with sadness in her eyes and secrets on the tip of her tongue and she is surrounded by fog)
EMMICA: (singing to herself) Oh as the red bird sings, promise love, you’ll wait for me
(she kneels and begins setting out flowers)
UNKNOWN VOICE: (from offstage, sings back) Dance with me in autumn leaves, promise love, you’ll wait for me
EMMICA: (looks up) Where are you?
(Another girl in a nightgown enters. This is ADELINE, a young woman with an aura of dreaminess about her. She is free-spirited, surrounded by adventures.)
ADELINE: I’m always here.
EMMICA: Not when I’ve come.
ADELINE: Maybe we’ve just missed each other. I waited for you. (she crosses towards Emmica and kneels beside her) It’s so cold.
EMMICA: It’s cold all the time now.
ADELINE: Why are you out here?
EMMICA: I had to give you flowers.

Day 7- Meeting with Ms. Bossen

Today, I met with Rebecca Bossen who is a playwright. We talked about the process of how plays get produced, stage directions and the importance of research. First, she explained the process of production. Basically, you start out by writing the play and “toiling over it” for however long that takes. Then, you enter it in contests or submit to theaters (which all have specific varying rules) for stage readings, but your piece can get stuck in stage writing purgatory if you continue to fuss over it. It’s important to have real people reading it and working with it so it can evolve into being more realistic/alive. Once you’re more satisfied with the script, you submit it to theaters for productions. There’s a whole business side of this, but Ms. Bossen claimed that she’s not too savvy with that, advising me to research it to get more knowledge. The involvement in the “world premiere” production of a piece depends on the director, playwright and theater, but it’s important to give the actors space to play with the work and find their own choices. She uses the metaphor of having a baby and handing it to someone who’s going to hold it over a ledge while asking them not to drop it. During rehearsals is like making sure the baby isn’t covered with Crisco. Overall, she used parenting as a metaphor for playwrighting because you create something that starts as just yours, but then it spreads out more and more and then it “moves to New York and becomes a lawyer”. Second, we discussed stage directions and she told me three important things. 1. if it’s something that can be communicated in the conversation/scenes in a play, put it there 2. tell them what to do but not how to do it (ie saying something like “the stage fills with water” which needs to happen, but the director can make the choice how) and 3. give them enough that they can make sense of the play. Third, we talked about research and Ms. Bossen laughed when I asked about it because she literally has a powerpoint on it. She pulled it up and explained to me that while there is such thing as too much research, you owe it to whoever you’re writing about to do some. Her main piece of advice is, “Everybody knows something”. You can do general research, like for her play Delilah Lee which is an Appalachian ghost story where she read a lot of Appalachian ghost stories or specific historical research. For example, Ms. Bossen is in the process of doing research for Delia Bacon, a famous author who had a theory that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare. Her process for this research was a spark, a latent period, reading books, getting grants, travelling, the rabbit hole and now, the writing. While speaking about her process, she showed me a picture of Folger Library, which she calls “Hogwarts for Shakespeare nerds” and a letter that Delia Bacon wrote asking how “her little Rebecca is”, which Ms. Bossen referred to as her “creepy magic moment”. However, no human being can reasonably completely know someone else, so you need to eventually get the story onto the page and out into the world. We are planning to meet again this Thursday, which I’m very excited for.

Day 5 (Part 3)- Meeting with Ms. de Hahn

In the late afternoon, I met with Tracee de Hahn, a mystery writer. We talked about planning stories in a more tangible way and she explained her outlining structure. First, she finds three contemporary books that are relatively similar to what she’d like to write and outlines them, going chapter by chapter to write out who’s perspective it is, the setting and a summary of what happens along with characters introduced, the length of the chapter and the balance of dialogue to description. She advises using color coding to differentiate various things. Then, she lays them out on a huge poster board with tick marks every 10 pages in chronological order (ie if a chapter is from page 3-7, it would go in the 1-10 tick mark). Last, she looks at the distribution of all categories and uses that as a pattern to craft her book. For outlining her original stories, Ms. de Hahn does the same basic structure, but uses index cards with more general plot points instead of typing up specific details. The image above is an example of her outlining for Elizabeth George’s work.

Day 5 (Part 2)- Meeting with Josh Pachter

For the first part of this afternoon, I met with Josh Pachter who is an author of crime fiction short stories. He gave me a lot of wonderful advice on inspiration, writing short stories, researching the marketplace and why crime fiction is one of the best genres. First, he told the story of how he’s come up with three of his short story anthologies- crime fiction based on the work of singer-songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffet and Billy Joel). Mr. Pachter likes to say it’s “brought to you by the letter k”. He has a website that’s self-made with multiple functions including bibliography of all publications in chronological order. A few years ago, he decided to make a second one that listed his works in alphabetical order and when doing this, he noticed that there were 6 letters that none of his works had ever started with. So, he decided to write six stories, each using one letter that had never been used before. The first he chose to start with was K and he immediately thought of Killer Kyle from Joni Mitchell’s The Beat of Black Wings. After writing the story, he realized that he didn’t exactly have a market to sell it to and that he would have to edit his own collection in order to include it. A couple other anthologies based on singer songwriter’s work had been published (Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen), so he thought of doing one for Mitchell. He reached out to other authors he knew and all of them said yes to contributing stories into what eventually became The Beat of Black Wings. Second, he explained to me that short stories are more difficult to outline because less happens in them, but that they’re the best way for new authors to start out because there’s more of a marketplace, you can write more in the same amount of time it would take you to write a longer work which lets you hone your craft and it’s a lot easier for someone to get published. For example, he gave me the resource of Ellery Queens Magazine, which is a crime fiction magazine that has an entire department of first stories which specifically features authors that have never been published before and gives them the chance to beat the “catch 22” of only getting published if you’ve had experience. Third, we talked a lot about researching the market place. He recommended using a book called Book Writer’s Market which can be found at the library in order to narrow down which publications are important in a specific genre and then researching all of them and actually reading them to get a sense of what they’re looking for. He compared Book Writer’s Market to Wikipedia in that they’re both a great starting point that will guide you to better sources. Finally, Mr. Pachter endorsed crime fiction because it’s what he writes and has consistently been the best opportunity for someone who wants to be a professional writer to break into serious writing.

Day 5(Part 1)- Meeting With Dan Kane

This morning, I had a wonderful conversation with Dan Kane, an investigative journalist from the News & Observer. We talked a lot about research, how he gets leads and contacting various public officials. First, Mr. Kane explained the importance of documents to me, saying that “documents can’t lie, people can”. He recommended trying to find documents that explain what’s going on in clear way, with concrete evidence. He also advised me to record everything when interviewing people so you have the information to refer back to verbatim for later. Second, we talked about how he finds topics to write an article on. He says he gets ideas from anonymous tips through social media, email or letters. An example of a tip that got him a huge story was when someone told him about the position of “house historian”, where someone was getting paid for a job and never coming into the NC legislature to do anything. After more research, he found that this woman was originally in charge of the page program(a program for high schoolers to learn more about the state legislature), but that she was housing the teens with her son who was a convicted felon with a history of drug use. Quietly, the NC speaker of the house moved her to a new position as to not cause any type of scandal. Another way that Mr. Kane finds stories is through what he likes to call “triggers”, when he notices something and figures there’s more than meets the eye. His four “triggers” are 1. money 2. risk 3. power and 4. secrecy. Finally, we talked about the importance of the balance between being aggressive and assertive when talking to public officials. He told a story of when he was communicating with the department of revenue after hearing they were keeping money from taxpayers who had accidentally overpaid. They refused to give him any information or relevant documents because it was supposedly illegal to share taxpayer information. However, after reading the statue he was sent, Mr. Kane pushed back and pointed out that this was only in the case of individual information and he wanted collective data. By standing his ground and remaining cool, he was able to push back without seeming angry or biased. He says that this is one of the most fulfilling parts of his career as a journalist because a lot of people got their money back due to his work. However, he also pointed out that a lot of journalism is frustrating because even with clear evidence, people may not want to make a change. For example, he and his team wrote up an article presenting concrete evidence that lack of supervision in prisons causes deaths. They used the story of a homeless woman who was arrested for “pandering” and died in jail because she didn’t have access to her medication, but then was buried before the state could perform an autopsy. However, because sheriffs have so much political power, nobody is making any changes or enforcing regulations on prisons, so Mr. Kane is not able to do anything about the problem. Most importantly, he told me that journalists are the eyes and ears of the people, so it’s essential that they always do their job because they’re what continues to keep the country a democracy by holding officials accountable.

Day 4 (Part 2)- Meeting With Jamie Mason

This afternoon, I was lucky enough to speak with Jamie Mason, a local mystery author who has signed a TV deal for her work. I learned so much from her about getting published, tv or movie deals, outlining, writing complex characters with clear motivations and self revisions. Ms. Mason emphasized how important it is to read A LOT and “fill your head with the sound of words you like”, while not being afraid to put down books you’re not into. She also talked about how query letters are a way for agents to see you can write well and that you know how to follow directions. In her words, it’s “making sure you’re not a crazy person”. She gave me the writing prompt of going to local newspapers, finding the most interesting headline and writing about it without reading the article. Her general tip for making twists is “what’s bad in this situation and what would make it worse”. She suggests using personality indicators like the Emotional Thesaurus and reading up on psychology to further develop characters. Ms. Mason recommended forming a critique group to get opinions with honest feedback from people who know what you’re doing and if you’re actually doing it well. Her biggest piece of advice is “know going in that if this is something you love to do, you have to take care of yourself”. It’s important to separate yourself from your work because fans and haters are not loving or hating you. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Day 4 (Part 1)- Meeting With Abby Muller

This morning, I got the opportunity to have a conversation with Abby Muller, an editor at Algonquin Publishing. One of the first things she said to me that really stood out is that publishing is the intersection of art and commodity. Basically, she explained to me that publishers want well-written books, but they also want to be able to sell them because they do need to make a profit. In particular, small companies like Algonquin need to make money off of every book they sell because they only publish about 20-24 books a year, whereas the “Big 4” can take more risks. We also talked about the publication time line, starting with authors getting an agent through querying. The agent then sends manuscripts to editors and uses “comps”, which are essentially comparisons to other existing books. For example, if you’ve ever heard someone recommend a novel to you as “x popular book meets y popular movie” to give you an idea of what it’s about, that’s a comp. These are taken heavily into consideration when publishers are choosing whether or not to take a book. After they have made an offer on a book (the highest thing at stake is advances, which are offering the author to pay them up front a certain amount, but then they will not get additional royalties until prices have reached that amount again. If the advance is $10,000, an author will get that money up front, but if their book doesn’t sell that much, they still get to keep the money), the editor will edit with an editorial letter, similar to the reader’s report I wrote and the author will revise. After this first revision, the editor does line by line edits and this process goes back and forth until they decide the book is ready. The manuscript then goes to copy editors who do typesetting and production. At this time, marketing begins contacting booksellers and publicity reaches out to radios, book reviewers and other public figures to advertise. She shared a saying with me- “marketing gets the book into the stores, publicity gets it out”. Since this process is extensive, it typically takes around a year. We also had a conversation about the reader’s report I wrote and she gave me some good advice on writing summaries in the future- you only need to include enough information that the reader will be able to follow critiques without having seen the manuscript. Overall, this was an extremely informative and interesting meeting, so I’m glad got the chance to talk with Ms. Muller.

Day 2- Editing Manuscripts

Today, in preparation for my meeting with Abby Muller from Algonquin books on Friday, I read over a manuscript she sent me and wrote up a reader’s report for her. These reports are used to determine whether or not the actual editor should take a look at the manuscript. The outline is basically giving a brief summary of plot, general critiques, specific positive feedback and then more specific critiques before stating if it deserves a second thorough read, a light read or should just be skimmed. I also read over the first few chapters of Ms. Quigley’s new book to provide her with edits/feedback and participated in some virtual, asynchronous workshops that she provided me with a link to. Overall, I got to do a lot of reading today, which was awesome because I absolutely adore books.

Day 1- Meeting With Mindy Quigley

Today, I had the opportunity to have a quick call with Mindy Quigley, an award winning mystery author. She gave me lots of advice on writing query letters, told me some background about how she got published and gave stories of lots of her friends who are also published writers. Ms. Quigley is getting me in touch with some of her colleagues, so I look forward to lots of interesting advice and stories over the rest of the program! Specifically, we had a wonderful conversation about the use of pitches and how to write them for specific genres like romance, mysteries and westerns.