Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Winding up the EWW

Winding up the Exploratory Writing Workshop

Lessons 7 and 8

I’ve been thinking about these last two lessons in the EWW. Once the six vignettes are written… what is the best way to go from there to complete the full developmental outline of the student’s story. Trying to keep the process as simple as possible I’ve concluded the following approach.

Lesson 7:

Take a piece of paper and list “Chapters 1-20”
Take the six vignettes and plug the names into six of the above slots.
For each of the six choose the key events in each vignette and list them beneath as subsets of the chapter.

When you finish you might have plugged Chapters 1, 3, 7, 10, 15 and 19.

Lesson 8:

Name Chapter’s 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9,11, 12, 13, 14 ,16, 17, 18 and 20.
Look at how each plugs into the other in the sequence and develop the bullet events each must contain to transition and fill the gaps
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After writing the six (6) vignettes the student should have enough information to complete the outline. With this outline it is rather easy to go on and finish the novel. It is on a piece of paper in bite sized chunks and the thread of the story has been percolating for six weeks. Think of a vignette as the sketch of a chapter. If you can write a vignette a chapter should be no problem. These are tactical issues the student has already demonstrated proficiency in doing as they worked lessons 1 through 6.

Advantages:

1. The student now has a much clearer sense for how the story is going to flow than they did to start with. If they had just started pushing the pencil (pounding the keys) about a third of the way through they would encounter a big mess. A protagonist who is an “Uncentral Character” is one of many problems that result from not integrating strategic and operational thinking into the developmental process.

2. The strategic and operational items are now front end loaded into the outline and the student has an appreciation for what they are and how important they are to the story. These involve things like a Dramatic Premise, Life Changing event, Want need or desire, and three crises that build in magnitude and intensity, moving the story along, as well as transitions and how to identify a chapter’s essential events, doing chapter outlines, writing a synopsis and doing an initial draft.

3.These are some of the structural underpinnings that form the framework of a longer and more complex work, upon which the key components are appended. Once that is in place the student is ready to take that familiar palate of tactical writing skills and paint over in the strokes that make their voice and style of writing unique.