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.
Tag: publishing
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 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 3- Meeting with Robin Allnutt
Today, I had the privilege of meeting with Virginia Tech writing professor, Robin Allnutt. We had a great conversation about the editing process, creating drafts and how to know what material to cut out. He gave me the advice of taking some time between drafts to think about ideas so that you can develop them more fully. We also discussed cutting content from stories and for this, he had two excellent metaphors that really stuck with me. First, he compared descriptions to turning a jewel around to see the different ways that light reflects off it. Then, he talked about how writing is sort of like juggling in the sense that you are deciding whether to focus on character, plot or setting at any given moment. Mr. Allnutt recommended some books to me, such as The Things They Carry and told me to “be absolutely wild with [my] ambitions” when I mentioned interest in screenwriting. I’ve also begun working on my query letter, which is something you send to agents so that they will pick up your book to help you get it published.
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. 