Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Favorite Author Chapter Template (FACT)

My class here at New Horizon's Academy completed registration on Saturday and will begin on Wednesday. I've been very busy! Not only with the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) but also with my wife's latest project, new wood laminated floors in the two bedrooms.

This required moving everything while the carpet company workers laid in the floor panels. Tomorrow they do the guest room. What a pain in the pettootie.

I have some talented students in the Workshop. Some are further advanced than I am... That is always exciting. Fortunately the E-Course follows a strong model and I'm on fairly solid ground in the Program of Instruction.

Sometimes I get a journey man/woman writer with well developed tactical skills but less developed operational and strategic skills. For them a healthy dose of process is the key to keeping up their interest.

One of the things I learned in teaching the EWW was that many aspiring writers lack a familiarity with all the gizmos in a literary tool chest. For example their writing is heavy on exposition or dialog to pretty much the exclusion of other components, like back story, foreshadowing, interior dialog, symbolism and the other components that make for an interesting novel.

To remedy this common deficiency, the first lesson is writing a Favorite Author Chapter Template. Here they take a chapter from a favorite novel and identify all the components... like we used to have to do in diagraming a sentence. In doing this they also identify the percentage of words this component generally uses. It's like a chef interested not in just the ingredients of a dish but also the measure or proportions.... you know, like a pinch of this and a dollap of that.

So, for the first week that's what I hammer on. Making a template of examples in each category that go into writing a good chapter. By comparing their template to what they write they can insure a nice blend of components and not just some one-dimensional stream of conscious.

Once the template is completed they write a series of "Vignettes" (Chapters) which are combined in the final lesson into formulating the structure of an outline. This becomes the backbone of their novel.

It is amazing how professional sounding their work becomes when a chapter has the right ingredients mixed to proper measure.

This is where I'm at now in the Workshop.... actually ahead of the curve since about half the students have already completed their templates. How cool is that?