New Courses Posted

Looking for more help on writing? Don't forget to look outside of OU.

Gotham Writers Workshop just posted their new schedule of online classes. Here's a sample:

How to Freelance With a professional freelancer as your guide, learn strategies for selling magazine and newspaper articles on a regular basis. Now available as a four-week online seminar.

Start Writing Nonfiction Explore six popular forms of nonfiction writing — memoir, personal essay, features, profiles, travel writing, and reviews — in this six-week class.

Creative Writing 101 This is the ideal class for anyone who wants to write, but doesn't know where to start — a six-week exploration of creative writing that is sure to inspire.

Advanced Article Writing Learn techniques for crafting professional-calibre articles and pitches. Now offered online.

They also have Master Classes, which require you to submit a writing sample and apply for admission, that are geared to more serious writers. Their spring courses are:

Memoir Writing Master Class with memoirist Ana Maria Spagna
Screenwriting Master Class with screenwriter Max Adams
Science Fiction Writing Master Class with Nebula Award-nominated author Marta Randall

I have taken an introductory screenwriting course from GWW. I recommend them as a cheap, affordable way to supplement your PW studies. --- Will Prescott

Looking Under Rocks

Last Saturday, Jocelyn and I attended Mel Odom's writing workshop at the Norman Public Library.

Both of us were blown away with his knowledge and his ability to teach. As you know, he is currently teaching a section of Short Story at OU this semester.

However, you can also take classes from him at the Moore-Norman Technology Center for a fraction of OU's rates.

Or, if you prefer, you can take free classes on the internet. Click here for more information.

Point is, we all know resources are limited in the PW program at OU. However, if you broaden your sights a bit, there are other resources in the Norman/OKC area.

Any other ideas?

Living Large

One of us is making it big...

Last month, the Sci-Fi channel premiered a new series The Dresden Files. The show is based on the successful fantasy series of the same name by former PW student, Jim Butcher. It's in a prime timeslot too: Sundays at 8pm, right before the network's most successful show Battlestar Galactica.

I read a book in Butcher's series for Chester's Category Fiction class two year ago. The man has a killer concept - mixing the fantasy genre with pulp detective fiction - and it works.

Currently, you can see the series premiere on iTunes for free. Or, set your DVRs for Feb. 28th at 6pm for the five episode mini-marathon.

Watch the show and support one of our own.

-- Will Prescott

The Ins and Outs of Outlining

Darcy Pattison, a children's writer (and not a OU alum), has a good resource here on outlining.

She calls the various outlining strategies propagated in craft books as a "continuum that goes from a minimalist approach to a very structured approach."

Among the approaches that she details is Dwight V. Swain's, who served as PW professor from 1952 to 1974. Current PW students should recognize the structure:

Some writers want the maximum amount of structure before they begin to write. Dwight V. Swain in Techniques of the Selling Writer recommends that fiction writers plan each scene before writing. Each scene begins with a goal, goes through a conflict to a disaster. Scenes are followed by sequels which detail the reaction to the previous scene, a dilemma, and a decision that leads naturally to the next scene. Before you start to write, Swain says, you should have your entire novel planned as a series of scenes-sequel units.

Swain's outline structure would look like this:
I Scene/sequel one
A Goal
B Conflict
C Disaster
D transition to sequel
E Reaction
F Dilemma
G Decision
II Repeat

Classical story structure is considered "classical" for a reason; the times change, it doesn't. -- Will Prescott

Former PW'ers Who Done Write: David McGee

Our first profile is about...

David McGee, a famous rock critic and music writer, whose work has appeared in Rollling Stone, Spin and countless other music magazines. He has also written acclaimed biographies on B.B. King, Cat Stephens, and Steve Earle.

McGee went to OU and cites the late William Foster-Harris, a PW professor from 1939 to 1974, as his writing mentor:

He was a crusty old fellow at that time, in his late 60s or early 70s, and had been at Oklahoma a long time--the joke was that they had built the journalism school building around him... In addition to classroom lecture, I had one-on-one sessions with him that required me to write a new short story every week and bring it in for him to "edit." What he did was to take a red pencil and rip each story apart--he wrote as many words in the margins as I had written in the story, and there were angry red streaks all over the manuscripts from changes he had made.

I endured this for two years until I finally worked up the nerve to ask him if he would tell a student to consider some other course of study. He answered that sure, he was always up front about things like that... He explained that all those red streaks and the margin commentary were meant to instruct me in matters of structure. "You’ve got the one thing that can’t be taught," he said, "and without it you can’t be a writer: Imagination."

...He wrote a wonderful book on fiction writing called Basic Formulas of Fiction, which was our text in the professional writing curriculum at that time. The title is deceiving: Foster-Harris’s theories about writing were rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, and his book elucidated those theories and provided practical instruction in clear thinking and, hence, clear prose. I loved that man, and was sorry he didn’t live to see me published in Rolling Stone.

As I wrote earlier, this is the first in many posts on successful writers from OU's PW department. Any nominations for future profiles? --- Will Prescott