Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Premises for the Exploratory Writing Workshop

The EWW has not changed much over the years since I first wrote it, however it has certainly evolved. The evolution is not so much in structure as it is in finding new ways to explain what has existed all along.

One of he things I did to begin with to was "Shadow Take" the class. By this I mean that before opening the door to the first students I pretended I was one myself and did all the lessons. This required that I accomplish all the Practical Exercises and write all the Vignettes contained in the Lessons.

There were a host of core premises behind developing the Program of Instruction. These were:

1. A novel uses a common set of writing components.

2. Character Development trumps Plot Development.

3. Enigmatic Characters tell the best stories.

4. The human mind has a finite capacity for concurrently processing data.

5. An outline is a prerequisite for writing a novel

6. An outline is impossible without first developing Characters .

7. Developing Characters is impossible without drawing sketches

8. A vignette is to an author what a sketch pad is to a fine arts painter.

9. The first three vignettes are crucial to writing a novel.

10. Vignette 1 shows a Before Snapshot of the Central or POV Character (CC) moving about in a relatively static environment.

11. Vignette 2 shows the CC sucked from this placid pool into a swift moving current. Here the author must begin to show the Wants, Needs and Desires of the POV Character.

12. Vignette 3 shows the CC swept over the falls and caught up in a Life Changing Event (LCE).

13. These three vignettes are sequential and flow from one to the next. They make up the essence of and are analogous to the first three chapters of a novel.

14. A novel has three phases. A beginning, a middle and an end. Phase 1, 2, and 3.

15. In Phase 1 the POV character faces the first major obstacle.

16. In Phase 2 the POV character deals with the second major obstacle.

17. In Phase 3 the POV character deals with the climax of the novel.

18. Each phase consists of about ten (10) chapters.

19. How a writer strings chapters together is called Operational Writing.

20. Operational Writing requires the author to take off the Tactical hat and don the Operational one.

21. In the middle of each Phase a vignette shows the respective hurdle developing.

22. In phase 1 the obstacle is centrally treated in Chapter 7 with a proxy vignette.

23 In phase 2 the obstacle is addressed and developed in Chapter 16 with a proxy vignette.

24. In phase 3 the obstacle is treated in chapter 26 with a proxy vignette.

25. The sketching vignette for each phase provides a pivot for working backwards and forwards and developing in story chain the intervening chapters transitions and a synopsis.

26. Once an outline is developed it is possible to Tactically write in bite sized chunks, one chapter at a time.