Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Macro Lessons Learned

Macro Lessons Learned

Well, today I need to do the lesson 6 Reviews. I won’t do them all, maybe, two. I like doing them because I get drawn into the stories my students are writing and see the potential of how things are developing. There were some lessons learned and I will list a few so I don’t forget. Some of these you have heard before but they bear repeating.

Lesson1: A writer tends to become linear and rigid if they just go with the first story line idea that comes to mind. Exploratory writing gives them a chance to write a manageable length vignette that examines the possibilities while the thinking is still fluid.

Lesson 2: I often resisted using an outline because I lamented… “How do you write an outline of something when you don’t know what it’s about?” Again writing exploratory vignettes lets you get into get into the story and go with the natural flow.

Lesson 3: If a student uses the EWW process to validate an existing novel they are already locked in and the cement has dried. When they try to break from the form it tends to shatter before their eyes.

Lesson 4: Letting the story line that begins to evolve, reveal the characters and then letting the characters reveal the story answers the “Chicken or Egg” question that perplexes many writers. The vignettes allow for the exploration of both concurrently before the story sets up.

Lesson 5: The character the writer thinks is going to be the CC to start with is not always the CC suggested after six vignettes as the natural CC of the story. This happens in the writings of all the students…I am not saying they are always wrong to begin with but rather that interesting possibilities begin to emerge that should be explored before the process begins to firm.

Lesson 6: Some candidates for the CC role don’t have the amperage or opportunity to pull the job off.

Lesson 7: Six vignettes are enough to reveal the outline of the story.

Lesson 8: Taking six weeks to get the outline right is time well spent.

Lesson 9: Once the first cut of the outline is completed it provides a framework for the Operational and Strategic components that must be manually inserted into the story.

Lesson 10: The structure of the Workshop teaches what these components are and gets the writer thinking about them; however, it is in the outline phase that the student makes sure they are in place.

Lesson 11: Having an outline enables a structure that breaks down the story into bite sized chunks that do not have to be suspended in mind and can be developed in an easily workable tactical writing fashion.

No doubt there are many more that I could list and these would be subsets of Tactical, Operational and Strategic writing which I need to define with greater specificity in updating the course on these lessons learned. However these are eleven of the Macro ones that have reared their heads as noteworthy.