- Jennifer read a great intro from The 90 Day Novel by Alan Watt
- Cherrie is still reading The Midpoint by Mary Mercer and The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass
We briefly discussed where we were in all our projects:
- The group suggested a way to foreshadow the Crisis of Jennifer's story
- The group helped to define the Midpoint of Jennifer's story
- Cherrie, who has been stuck at the Midpoint, offers to critique entire novels for help and suggestions on how to integrate her subplots into her main plot better and suggestions on an ending.
Grapes of Wrath:
- Most of us have fallen behind but Jennifer and Cherrie will likely soldier on to the end.
- Cherrie still keeping up with the Spreadsheet. The Password is Content Cathedral.
- Differences in opinion about the character of the protagonist discussed.
- Consensus is that this classic likely would not have been published today due to the slow start.
- Some interesting things could be gleaned from the reading, however, like an interesting way to introduce a long passage of setting using conflict to create tension.
- And what really is with the turtle in Act 1??
Discussion of various editing techniques:
- Discussed getting passive voice and passive verbs out of your writing.
- Cherrie offered to make her Word Search handout available
- To work with the Word Searches you should use Open Office (Make sure you are on the official Apache site.)
- Just copy the list of words separated by vertical lines into the search box and hit "find all"
- Once you have all the words selected, highlight them or change the font color. Now you can work on getting rid of weak verbs, filter words and passive voice.
Suggestions for a more modern book to analyze:
- Cherrie made a big push for Game of Thrones and will try to set up something to get 15-20 people interested in a dissection of George R. R. Martin's writing style.
- She has set up a Blog for the purpose: GameOfThronesForWriters.com.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to edit this post.
