Notes:

The workshop will run each Monday and Thursday starting on 10 March 2008. We're simply working through Noah Lukeman's First Five Pages together, supporting each other to complete quite an intense but excellent book. (More details)

For each class I will post the chapter for reading and the exercises, plus any related articles on the Fiction Writing site, and the following class will deal with any questions and follow up of those exercises. So the aim is to complete the exercises for Monday's class by Thursday, and the exercises from Thursday's class by the following Monday.

You are welcome to post questions and examples, but posting lengthy excerpts of your work is not recommended on a public forum.

Update:

If you have come late to this thread, you are still welcome to join in at any time. It is your choice whether you want to catch up any classes you've missed, or dive straight in to the current class. If you prefer to select just the topics that you're most interested in, that's fine too.

Easy navigation:

As this thread gets longer, you might want to switch between the "Flat" view, and "Threaded" view. Threaded view will list just the headings of each post in this thread and you will easily be able to click on the specific class you require.

To change views, click Topic Options at the top of the thread. Click Switch to Threaded Mode. Click Topic Options again to return to Flat Mode.

Schedule:

Week 1: Presentation; Adjectives and Adverbs

Week 2: Sound and Comparison

Week 3: Style and Dialogue Part 1

Week 4: Commonplace and Informative Dialogue

Week 5: Melodramatic and Hard to Follow Dialogue

Week 6: Showing versus Telling; Viewpoint and Narration

Week 7: Characterisation and Hooks

Week 8: Subtlety and Tone

Week 9: Focus and Setting

Week 10: Pacing and Progression

Welcome to the [url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.

Hi Elle, I just wanted to check in and let you know I've been here and read your introduction to presentation. I don't have any questions yet but am following along. Thank you for the convenient links.

Good on you Moe

Wow, Moe, fancy meeting you here. I ran to the library yesterday and picked up the book and have put my first 5 pages in a new file, read the intro and chap. 1, and will be hunting down those evil adjectives and adverbs, parentheses, and question marks later. For now, I'm off to teach my granddaughter how to drive a 5-speed car! Pray that my antidepressant holds up I'm excited about this workshop, guys!

Oh, and by the way, Moe, my new website is up and I'm still working on it, but you can use it.

Talk at ya'll later.

Betty in TN

Hi Betty, welcome! Have fun with the driving lessons! Is a 5-speed car what we in Aus call a manual (ie, stick shift)?

Thanks for the welcome, Elle. Yes, it's a manual or "stick" shift. When I learned, there were only 4 speeds. And my granddaughter yesterday did great--until she hit a mailbox! We'd been driving for about 8 hours straight, pulling into drive-in restaurants, going to Wal-Mart, parks, visiting her friends, etc., and I think she was just tired and "over confident" and veered too far to the right. No one got hurt, and the car only got a flat tire, so we're okay. But by the time I got home around 8 pm last night, I fell into bed and into a deep sleep. I'm exhausted! But SHE'S DRIVING!!!

Monday�s assignment was a nice easy session to get you started. If you do suddenly have a question later in the workshop that relates to an earlier class, please click the Reply button on one of the posts that has the appropriate post title for your question (ie, Presentation questions under �Presentation�; Adjective questions under �Adjectives and Adverbs�).

That way, when this thread gets very long, anyone using Thread Mode to organise the workshop lessons will have each post filed under the correct title. (See my update to the first post in this thread under �Easy Navigation� about using Thread Mode.)

So, on to the second class.

Adjectives and Adverbs

Your assignment:

1. Read through Chapter 2: Adjectives and Adverbs of The First Five Pages.

2. Read through the article [url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.

Sound

This chapter is where all your poetry reading will start to make sense. The main similarity between the online poetry suggestions I selected above was the sense of rhythm of the poems. Reading a variety of poetry like this can help to �tune� your ear to the sound of writing, whether you read it aloud or silently. With enough practice, you will begin to hear whether a piece of writing has a pleasant sound, rhythm, or cadence as you write it or reread it, and unpleasant, jarring writing will also stand out for you.

Your assignment for the third class:

1. Read through Chapter 3: Sound of The First Five Pages.

2. Read through the article Controlling the rhythm of your writing

3. As per the end of chapter exercises, select one or more paragraphs from your pages and work on the sound and rhythm of your writing.

4. Go back to some of the poetry you really enjoyed over the past week. Look carefully again at the rhythm of the poem. What makes it such a pleasing piece to you? Is it the selection of the words, or the specificity of the metre? Is the metre controlled or loose? Does the poem have a regular beat, or does it flow?

5. Select some of your paragraphs and rewrite them as poetry. Where does the metre fall? How would you need to change your prose in order to create a pleasing poem from it?

Elle -- Thanks for providing the poems to read. The first one I read was the Inaugural Poem by Maya Angelou and it absolutely carried me away! I can't stop thinking about it.

I was shocked to discover I didn't have as many adjectives and adverbs on my first few pages -- they probably appear in heaps and bounds later in the ms. I did see lots of ways jut to change the wording, though, and I think writing the rest of my draft I will keep the cautions about nouns and verbs that need no modifiers in mind. Then editing those pages may be a lot easier. I love this workshop. Thank you.

Betty Schmidt
bettyannschmidt.com