A Blast from our Past

The Professonal Writing program at OU started in 1938. Here's how our founders envisioned our program. Let's work together with our faculty to continue PW's tradition of excellence!

The Founders' Principles
by Walter S. Campbell and Kenneth Kaufman

The University of Oklahoma considers Professional Writing to be a highly skilled art, comparable with law, medicine, or education. It is suggested to prospective students that at least one school year of hard, intensive study is a minimum prerequisite to professional competence. If at all possible some of the work should be taken in residence.

Mere education in reading and writing, the ability to spell and use correct grammar, is no more competence in professional writing than the ability to push down keys on the piano is mastery of music. This University endeavors to supply a complete regime of training to prepare competent professional writers.

The highly successful record of the program over a period of many years indicates that its methods are sound. No promises, no guarantees are made to any student. It offers only honest judgment and the soundest professional coaching methods it is capable of delivering.

Our founders were on to something. Visit the links on Famous Former Students who have come out of our program.

--Jocelyn Pedersen

Romance Book Sale

The Norman Public Library is holding a romance book sale this Saturday and Sunday, February 10 & 11.

--Elizabeth Childers

Short Course Information

Wondering what the Short Course is?

The Short Course was the first conference on professional writing in the nation. Started in 1938, the course began as a one day public event and over time expanded to five days.

Students could attend the course at a discount and get academic credit for doing so. Many PW students signed their first contracts at the short course.

The course was held annually for 64 years until it passed away in 2002. To see information about the last course, click here.

We are committed to resurrecting the Short Course by late spring/early summer of this year. This year's Short Course will be small one-day affair where students, PW alums, and local writers can get together for workshops on professional writing.

In order to do this, we need your help. Please contact oupwsa@gmail.com to volunteer. Or, come to the next PWSA meeting on Saturday, Feb 24th at 2pm in the PW Lounge.

--Elizabeth Childers

Next Meeting Saturday, February 24

The next PWSA meeting will be Saturday, February 24 at 2:00 pm in the PW lounge in Copeland Hall.

If you don't know where the lounge is, wait by the SE doors and Will or I will meet you there. We will plan bringing back the PW Short Course and starting the first book club.

Questions? Our phone numbers are:

Elizabeth 405-650-7390
Will 405-343-4096

See you there!

--Elizabeth Childers

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

Welcome!

This is the humble beginnings of the almighty PWSA.