I see that it's going on this summer and the next. Apparantly the page submitted by the hopeful participant has to come in at least 18th place in competetion for a slot.
My concern is that mine will not be up to par next year (this year is likely out of the question). Will I have another shot afterwards?
Posts: 169 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
I'm joining the faculty at Southern Virginia University, and will probably alternate years - one workshop in the east (at SVU) and one in the west (usually Utah because I have places I can stay there for free).
As for "coming in 18th," that's really not the way I work. I look at samples only to see who seems to be in a position where the workshop would have value for them - writers who are ready to learn the things I teach. We had one applicant that we urged NOT to take the workshop because their work was already professional quality and publishable; and there are some I turned away because, despite lots of talent, they seemed to be interested in writing a kind of fiction that my workshops won't really help them improve. (What I call performance stories, which are all about the style of the writer; there's a definite audience for this work, but my workshops are geared toward those for whom the tale itself comes before the performance of it.)
So it's not so much a competition, with losers out, as a screening. And if I don't have fifteen applicants that are ready for the workshop, I won't fill in with unready people. I'd be cheating them just to get their money and I couldn't live with the guilt.
The ideal number, actually, is about a dozen. The more you have after that, the more stories everybody has to read, and when there are too many - 18 is really too many - then it becomes hard for many of the students to learn all they should from each others' mistakes and successes. I add more (above 12) only because they really seem to want to and I think I can help, at least a little, to get them past whatever is keeping them from really communicating or creating the stories they want to tell.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
Wow, thanks for the response! As a bright-eyed bushy-tailed fan it's a thrill to get a direct reply. I appreciate the clarity. Apparantly I envisioned a horde of bloodthirsty novice writers clamoring to get into the elite school.
Posts: 169 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
On a belated note, (those in attendance) are not going to have to sleep in bunks over a hard floor and shower together are they? Oh, memories of Naval boot camp. You made a comment in the Author's Note in Ender's Game that military formations were meaningless. That rather hit home for me.
posted
No. The two-day workshop isn't unreasonably priced, but still requires that you be serious. But the bootcamp is expensive, and deliberately so. I've found that the best test for who should be in a writers workshop is not "talent" (who can measure tomorrow's ability by today's attempt, anyway?) but intensity of desire to succeed and willingness to change.
I've found that time and money are a better test of this than writing samples. The very fact that you are willing to take a week off from your life (and job!) and spend a serious amount of money suggests that once you GET to the workshop, you'll do the work - write the story, read everybody else's, comment seriously, attempt to change the way you approach a story, LEARN.
I've taught some free one-day workshops over the years, and found that many of those who came were not serious at all - they just wanted to "win" by being selected. We were wasting our time with them; they had no desire to learn or change. If it had cost them anything, they would never have come.
It's part of human nature. We put our treasure where our heart is; or perhaps it's the other way around: Where you put your treasure, there will your heart be also.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
I am certain that my dillema is shared by many others out there in the world. I am looking for pre-college work at the moment. My plan was to earn enough money to stabilize myself and then attend college and major in... something. As I've been unsucessful in finding work and had time to mull over what I wanted to do, the prospect of writing has taken root. The wall that has kept out the idea of making writing into a living is a profound lack of confidence in myself.
As this mental struggle has festered in my mind these past weeks I stumbled on the announcement of the boot camp. To put out the question of my mind's seriousness - the announcement struck me like a physical blow. I read it as if it was placed there just for me to read, as if it was waiting for me to happen by Hatrack so I'd know of the opportunity.
Since I was fiveteen to now, twenty-one, I have not known what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to write. But only good writers get to do it for a living. How many thousands of people fail? How am I supposed to surpass them? I read the things I write and become frusterated with the quality.
Surely the people who succeed don't have that problem. Surely those people who are professional authors have practiced and studied years. What a head start those people have on a young adult who sits in front of his computer wishing he had the skill.
On another belated note, I wonder what magical effect the forum has that I spilled my heart with my fourth or so post.
posted
I teach writing workshops because they do help. But they are NOT essential. You learn more from writing 100,000 words than you do from any number of workshops. Even if your first novel isn't good, the next one will be better. There are things you learn simply from seeing what it feels like to do it that can't be learned any other way.
So if you want to write, then write. What's to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you'll know whether you enjoy doing it instead of wondering.
I think my classes help. I think the online workshops here that Kathleen Woodbury supervises are a great way of spurring yourself to greater efforts. But ultimately, it comes down to writing.
Of course, I had the ultimate workshop: I wrote plays and actors played the parts and read the lines. If a line can be read wrong, an actor will invariably find that wrong reading. So you learn how to write the line so it CAN'T be read wrong <grin>. Great training! (computer programming can help inculcate a similar insistence on clarity.)
What I'm saying is, don't set some false threshold you must pass over before you "start writing." Start now. Keep it up. Learn what you learn from the process itself. Analyze the results. Don't take failure personally; regard it as interesting information you can profit from. Read other people's work analytically, determining how they achieved the effects they had on you (or failed to have). (You learn more from writers you dislike than from the writers you like.)
And then, if at some point you still think a class of mine might be worth taking, I'll be glad to see you and help where I can. But the primary burden is on you, and the best teacher is your own work.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
I've also been told by other writers that the best way to learn how to write a better novel is to write a novel, and that you (the generic you, not the personal you) don't really get the hang of it until novel 5 or 6. It's at that point that the process starts to become internalized enough that you become a much much better storyteller. So if you write your first, and it's crap, and you write a second, and it's crap, but a better quality crap, and you write a third, and . . . Well, you get the idea. It doesn't matter that the first ain't great. It's to be expected. Just keep doing it and you'll get better.
The other thing is to join a critique group. Preferably with people who write the same genre as you do. Romance writers won't understand science fiction conventions as well, or murder mystery writers that of westerns. But people who write in the same genre as you will be able to provide much better feedback into what's working, what's not, and why. Plus when you start critiquing their stuff, it helps you see in a whole other light what works, what doesn't, and why, and it can really help you see how you can improve your own writing. However, don't worry about a crit group until you'll written a couple or more novels.
Learn the craft. Try things out. Not all writers write the same way. Some plot, some do world building, some develop entire languages. Some write by the seat of their pants. No method is valid or invalid by itself. What matters is what method will work best for you? Try different things out and find out.
posted
I don't suppose anyone knows of any independant source of scholarships or grants for this sort of thing? I completely understand the explanation and need for such a high tuition, but that doesn't really solve the problem of just not HAVING the money!
I don't really know much about where one would find grants for this kind of thing.
-Mimi (off to do a google in an attempt to answer my own question)
Posts: 772 | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
I've watched the registrations for this come and go each year from the sidelines . . . I just hope OSC keeps doing this for several more years. There's just no way I could leave my family for a week right now for something as self-centered as this would be, but when my kids are a little older I could definitely see myself doing this.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Mimsies, if you don't have enough money to do what you want to do, then I suggest you try what I tried. Write a few science fiction stories and sell them for the extra cash. The first one I sent off, "Tinker," didn't sell for years; but the second one was called "Ender's Game" and I got three hundred dollars for it.
In all seriousness, as long as you can get words typed on paper, why wait? How do YOU know you don't have the stories in you, right now, that will launch your career?
SteveRogers, we generally advise the two-day workshop be attended by people above high school age, but we make exceptions for younger people whose parents are sure that they're serious about writing - young people who really do write and write. Since I don't know how old you are, I can't say directly.
For boot camp, it absolutely would be a waste of time for anyone young enough not to have the life experience to know what is plausible or not in milieu creation. In my experience, even college students are generally too young. You have to have lived in the real world a little - earned a living, taken full responsibility for your life, or at least lived a life whose structure is not imposed by school - to be ready to write convincing stories that take place in a believable world. However, there have been exceptions even to that! Some people are able to do milieu creation effectively at a very young age. hence the writing samples <grin>.
Icarus, Hobbes is ageless, a force of nature, not to be compared to ordinary mortals and our primitive means of measuring time.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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