By Nichole Kanney
I heard the knock at my front door. The kids were just settled in for naptime, and I looked forward to taking advantage of the newfound calm that silenced my home. I cautiously open the door, as I’m new to the Midwest and not yet used to the concept of door-to-door sales still existing. I still have East Coast paranoia, thinking people only knock on other’s doors for nefarious reasons.
“Can I help you?” I ask. (more…)
By Donna Talarico
I’m a conference junkie. I have lots of notches in my conference bedpost, but over the past five years, my love for them has grown much deeper. Since 2010, I’ve attended almost 30 conferences and spoke at almost just as many. For me, events where likeminded people get together for a few days to learn and share are completely exhilarating experiences. I liken my favorite conference, HighEdWeb, to a creative writing residency: an intense few days where, around the clock, you’re with colleagues who turn into close friends over the course of just a few days. It’s also quite like summer camp. And if you attend annually, it’s a homecoming of sorts every single time. (more…)
By Sam Chiarelli
Writing is about overcoming obstacles: self-doubt, scheduling, silence. Creative nonfiction poses an additional challenge to its writer. You have to live what you write. While memoir forces an author to confront difficult internal circumstances, the science writing I wanted to pursue created external issues for me. (more…)
Walking into a room filled with people I did not know, I scanned the area quickly and headed for my safe spot—a back corner. Right or left doesn’t matter, but having the rest of the room in front of me does. For me, the corner means safety. No one looking over my shoulder or staring at the back of my head; no one approaching without me knowing. I have been in school a long time, and I cannot remember a class where I did not beeline for the corner.
Until HippoCamp. Although I was fulfilling the role of “sponsor” and representing Wilkes University and Etruscan Press at the inaugural HippoCamp15 Creative Nonfiction Conference, I was also excited to be an attendee—especially as this was my first writing conference.
Friday afternoon, after the rest of the crowd had meandered into the “Heritage C” conference room for the early reception and I felt it was safe to leave the booth, I sidled into the room and glanced at the back rows; both back corner seats were filled. Since this was just an overview of the weekend, however, the room was less than half full so I went to the right and chose a seat in the second-to-last row. I reminded myself that if I wanted that back corner seat, I needed to scope it out sooner; however, when I walked into Heritage C for the readings later that night, I skimmed right past the corners and edged up the right side to slide into the second row.
Wilkes/Etruscan Booth at HippoCamp15
The opening reception that evening found me back in the hall at the Wilkes/Etruscan booth; I’ve worked booths like this before, including once in the recent past for the Holocaust and Genocide Studies degree I was taking at the time. Then, I spent the majority of the event chatting with a French history professor and wondering if he had a girlfriend; few people were interested in the topic I represented, and conversion was far from my mind. At HippoCamp15, however, I felt no nerves, no concern for my ability to make small talk, no fear that I would force someone into a conversation. I soon realized that no writer engages in a conversation they wish to avoid; indeed, we tend to welcome the sharing of books, interests, and writerly news.
It was luck that for my first writing conference I worked behind the scenes as well. I’m not the “reach out and grab” type and I’m not a salesperson. In this atmosphere, however, I didn’t feel like one. Everything I said that weekend came from a well of sincerity within me—a well that only refilled with the conference’s atmosphere.
When I searched for an MFA program, a low-residency program was not on my list. Uncertain how I would fair in an online class, I also wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the extra eighteen months getting another MA—I had earned a Masters in English in 2004 and was just finishing one in history (although anyone who knows me knows this weak argument is sophistry…I love school). What won me over in the end, however, was the relationship Wilkes had with agents and editors and the realization that I would leave Wilkes with a completed thesis. The MA is a vital portion of the entire program Wilkes has to offer. I don’t feel like I’m trying to make a sale when I tell someone that—and I’m pretty sure they don’t feel as though I’m feeding them a line. I honestly admit the first “boot camp” residency was both the best and worst week of my life, but would repeat it in a heartbeat if I could. Explaining the foundations classes and the one-on-one semesters with a mentor doesn’t come from a manuscript I’m obliged to memorize; it comes from my enthusiasm to share what I’ve discovered.
I engaged in conversation with those who wandered up to the table. We talked about their writing interests. I spoke with students in MA programs in American literature, creative writing, and English; with attendees interested in their memoirs or their family histories; and with Wilkes alumni recalling their time in the program. Without realizing it, I managed to pepper each conversation with positive attributes of the program; as usual, my passion for something bubbles up and overflows.
As I drifted into the first panel Saturday morning, I once again found my back corners taken. Dropping my bag at a somewhat secluded spot and stepping out for a moment, I returned to the room to find a man sitting next to me, and my hackles rose. Who dared sit next to me? There were other chairs available—although it was filling up—so why sit next to anyone? I shrugged my instinctive protections off, however, and turned my attention to the topic at hand. As part of the takeaway, we each drew a map—the panel was on place in our work—and after about four minutes we were directed to discuss our map with our neighbor. Since the wall was my only other option, I turned to the man I had—only forty minutes earlier—been mentally castigating. Sharing our maps and our stories engaged us in each other’s work and brought us together as writers; my mental images about his upbringing were quite unfounded.
Wasting no time to get to the next room for the second panel, I strode right to the front and (since habits do die hard) chose a corner seat in the front row. I wanted no head in front of me, and didn’t care who was behind me. The other attendees melted away; no longer strangers of which to be wary, we were all writers eager to add to our repertoire.
After the third panel—standing room only—as I was collecting my things, the woman to my right turned to effuse about the flash nonfiction exercise we had just completed. There was a time my nervousness would have precluded my engagement in conversation with this woman—who had read the night before and been part of that morning’s debut author panel—and yet our mutual excitement over the panel brought us together for a brief moment.
In one short day I’d evolved from wary observer to active participant. I no longer considered myself an outsider watching the “cool kids” hang out, but thrust myself into their party and sat down at their table, where they welcomed me with uncapped pens.
Dale Louise Mervine is a current MA student and graduate assistant at Wilkes University. When she’s not writing, she’s arguing with her cats to please not step on the computer, listening to her pet skunk roll empty jars of baby food in the room above, and looking for excuses to take a nap. She lives in York, PA, whether she likes it or not.
Idyllwild, California feels separated from the rest of the world. The little mountain town of 4,000 is nestled in the San Bernardino National Forest. It’s quiet. It’s clean. What air there is at the mile-high elevation is fresh and clear. For reasons I cannot guess (given the size of the town and the fact that it’s 2014), Idyllwild offers more than one place to rent movies.
Maybe Idyllwild has some strong movie mojo, because the tiny town, two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, hosts the annual CineStory screenwriting retreat. (Two and a half hours can turn into six if you’re unfamiliar with L.A. traffic. That’s not a hypothetical figure – leave early in the day.)
CineStory is a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture new screenwriting talent through its annual retreat and fellowship. The retreat unfolds as a mix of panels, one-on-one sessions, and meals. Meals may seem an odd inclusion in that list, but the schedule allocates plenty of time for lunch and dinner socializing. The mentors – all industry professionals who donate their time – eat with the writers (that’s you – your CineStory badge has “WRITER” printed right below your name. The badge is a handy reminder for those moments when you doubt you could ever possibly be a writer – just check your badge! I still check mine from time to time.). Meals are a chance to talk shop in a laid back setting with people who know what they’re talking about. For me, this was an education in itself – getting a sense of how professionals talk about their own projects, the industry, and how one works within the other. It’s also one of the ways CineStory builds an extraordinary sense of community during the short four days of the retreat.
The panels cover a lot of different topics, from how to get a manager to sign you (the panelists in this case are working managers) to what producers look for in a script (with, yes, actual producers). A few panels blur the line between presentation and workshop. One session focused on crafting a great logline, and the writers all had a chance to present our loglines for critique by the panelists. Two sessions are devoted to writers pitching to mentors as if they’re in a meeting with studio executives. The mentors then conduct an “after meeting,” in which they talk about the pitch and the writer as executives would after the writer has left the room.
You’re assigned three ninety-minute meetings with mentors for one-on-one sessions. Each mentor has read your script before the meeting. I received several pieces of game-changing feedback. One example: I found out that my story, about a sixteen-year-old kid on a mission to rescue his dad, was straddling the line between a PG and PG-13 rating. In PG-13 movies released in the last five years, parents are almost always absent from the main story line. Guardians of the Galaxy? Mom dies, Dad missing. Hunger Games? Dad dead, Mom incapacitated by grief. The prevailing wisdom is that a PG-13 audience doesn’t want to see a movie about kids and their parents. They want stories in which the kids face challenges on their own.
I had time (meals!) to bounce that advice off several mentors during the r
etreat and almost everyone agreed. The lone standout said this may be true, but that his recommendation was for me to write whatever story I’m passionate about, regardless of the market. Since my passion for the story didn’t hinge on the dad rescue, I changed it.
My big takeaways:
I highly recommend CineStory. Remember to get out of L.A. ahead of traffic, then you’ll have time to enjoy the drive, walk around Idyllwild, and kick back with a rented DVD before the real fun begins.
You can find more information about CineStory at their website, http://www.cinestory.org.
Nathan Summerlin is a screenwriter, as well as a current M.F.A. student and Graduate Assistant for Etrsuscan Press. He lives in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
Jason Carney, an alumni of the Wilkes Graduate Creative Writing program, is due to release his memoir, Starve the Vulture, in January of 2015 with Kaylie Jones Books. Starve the Vulture has already received excellent feedback, including a review from Kirkus Book Reviews which states, “Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation.” The novel opens violently, with a car crash happening right before Carney’s eyes, just before a moment of epiphany which leads to Carney’s “grace”. This traumatic experience opens the novel with an enticing sense of danger, consistent with the chaotic uncertainty of Carney’s early life. There is an immediate understanding that the contents of this memoir will not be for the faint of heart. 
Akashic’s website describes the memoir as, “A lyrical, mesmerizing debut from Jason Carney who overcomes his own racism, homophobia, drug addiction, and harrowing brushes with death to find redemption and unlikely fame on the national performance poetry circuit. Woven into Carney’s path to recovery is a powerful family story, depicting the roots of prejudice and dysfunction through several generations.” (You can head to Carney’s page on Akashic’s site by clicking on the book cover to the right.)
One of the most prominent themes in the book is the importance of tolerance and compassion, and how those two things led to Carney’s redemption. Carney learns–through his relationship with an empathetic gay man dying of AIDS–to set his prejudices aside. When Carney does this, it leads to a greater, horrific discovery about the nature of his personal hatred for homosexuals–but instead of getting stuck in his own tragedy, he shares what he has learned about himself and the root of bigotry to students all over the country. Carney teaches others, when we lash out at a group of people, we learn to do so from personal experience and past prejudice.
Recently, Carney had the honor of performing a TED event at Mountain View College near Dallas, Texas. During his talk, he discussed the origins of his family, the hatred he once held for minority groups, and how he was taught to use poetry to define his world. He recites a few of his poems to a completely enraptured crowd, comparing past crimes against minority groups to modern statistics about the disparity between black and white inmates in America. He urges “White America” to have an honest discussion about the continued segregation of minority groups in our country, the silence of hatred, and the lack of conversation that perpetuates it. Carney closes the discussion by stating, “White America needs to have an honest conversation with itself because we segregate ourselves and we talk about freedom.”
I urge readers to check out his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8ZiB3gjwo8
Carney’s memoir is one of the most important memoirs you will ever read. I encourage everyone to get their hands on this book, which is available for preorder on Amazon. Until then, I was fortunate enough to have Jason Carney answer a few pre-emptive questions I had about the nature of Starve the Vulture, which you can read below!
Tell me a little about your book. What does it mean to you?
Starve the Vulture is the deciphering of the signs of my life. The breaking down of moments to their meaning, when a person takes a look back at their life trapped within severe moments of adversity.
I know that you mostly write poetry–why the switch? Was this a story you had been planning to tell for a long time?
I have been telling this story for 15 years on poetry stages and college campuses. So the progression from poetry to prose seems like a natural one. I had no intention of writing this story until my mother died in 2007. After my plunge into the final throes of addiction and the car wreck, I went to NYC and stayed on long-time friend and American Poets Roger Bon-Air Agard’s couch in Brooklyn. The next thirty days were spent at the Spring Lounge in Manhattan. Eight hours a day, in the back corner with my laptop. From those crazed and drying out hours of writing came 47,000 words which have been molded and revised into the present thread of the story. The original title of the book was Flowers from my Mother’s Funeral.
How was writing this similar to or different from writing poetry?
Similar in the sense that a narrative is a narrative. The poetry slam thrives on narratives, which I think helped me cut to the core of the scenes and not waste time with bullshit that did not belong. I honed my ability to bare my skin in that arena. You cannot hide in front of an audience. After a while, they become part of your writing ritual. I mean the writer brings this influence into the writing process with them.
Was writing this memoir a cathartic experience for you?
In the sense that this book gave me a gift. I wrote it to heal part of myself. This is the gift of this type of project. All writing should be done first for the writer and second for the audience. You cannot give away what you do not have. You cannot manufacture the treasure either, it will manifest the way it wants to in the writer’s life. The gift I received from vulture was not the one for which I wrote it. However, when it presented itself, I fell to my knees in that dorm room in gratitude. I refer to a spiritual gift here—no money or movie option or publishing contract can give this type of gift to you. It must come from the writing. From the universe to the artist, a thank you for the excavation of their bones.
Writing about things does tend to stir up the past and allows old things to resurface in your mind, were there any memories that came back to you that surprised you while writing this?
No not really. That is not true, when I wrote about spending time with my grandparent from the ages of 7-12 on Friday and Saturday nights, I was surprised at the hidden emotions of happiness
that I had denied myself for many years. The chapter was eventually cut from the book, yet when I read those passages I still tear up and cry. Happiness is hard for me.
I know that you had to change a lot of names for the memoir. Is there a concern that the people you’ve written about might recognize themselves and be angry?
I tried to write folks the way I remembered them being. I wanted to change names when discussing illegal acts. I am willing to put my actions out there, but I don’t have a right to expose anyone else. Those involved will recognize themselves, those not involved will not figure their identity. I will not tell them. The names in the book are not clues either. They are just random choices, they hold no secret meaning or metaphor. Cuban came from the lunch I was eating, Yardstick from the yardstick my son was using as a Light-Saber. And so on.
How do you feel the experiences you’ve had have shaped the man you are today?
Everywhere you go there you are. You are the constant in your own life.
Do you ever feel embarrassment in your professional life because of where you’ve come from, or prouder because of the adversity you’ve overcome that others have never been tested with?
I don’t measure myself against you or anyone else. I am unique to me and as common as everyone. No one is more or less than anyone around them. But I offer for you to under-estimate or overlook me. I like to be an unexpected surprise.
I usually make the last question, “What advice do you have for other aspiring writers?” But you have a story so powerful, so interesting, and very unique. I think a better question might be, “What advice do you have for other members of the human race who are faced with adversity?”
In the words of Jimmy V. “Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.” Throwing your arms up into the air is a sign of praise as much as it is a sign of surrender. People should be happy for what gifts they do have, especially amid all the clamoring for what they do not have.
Jason Carney, a performance poet from Dallas, Texas, is a four-time National Poetry Slam Finalist, honored as a Legend of the Slam in 2007. He appeared on three seasons of the HBO television series Russell Simmons’ Def Poets. Jason has performed and lectured at some of our nation’s finest colleges and universities as well as high schools and juvenile detention centers from California to Maine. A graduate of Wilkes University MFA Program for Creative Writing, where he was an honored winner of the Etruscan Prize, the Bergman Foundation Scholarship, and the Norris Church-Mailer Scholarship. He is Co-founder and Artistic Director of the non-profit Young DFW Writers.
In collaboration with Wilkes Magazine’s Summer Reads Contest, in which participants comment on the featured book of the week in order to win a free copy, I interviewed Todd McClimans, author of Time Traitor, whose book is currently participating in the contest.
Todd’s book, the first in the American Epochs series, is a middle grade, sci-fi/history novel about the adventures of children who travel to significant events in American history, such as the American Revolution, and where they meet historic American icons like Benedict Arnold.
The book’s Amazon reviews are very telling, with comments like, “McClimans does a masterful job of character development with his young heroes Ty and Kristi as well as the story’s supporting cast of friends and foes,” and “The author doesn’t shy away from the brutality of slavery or ground combat, and he does a fine job of showing that history, even the most painful aspects of it, is more complex than any textbook could capture.”
You can find out more about the book by going to Time Traitor’s website (http://www.timetraitor.com/), or it’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/toddmcclimans2013).
Could you tell me a little about your book?
Time Traitor is the first book in the American Epochs series, a Middle-Grade historical/sci-fi series that is meant to take kids to important eras, or epochs, in American history and hopefully trick them into learning some important history while enjoying a story. I decided to incorporate science fiction and time travel instead of writing traditional historical fiction because, for one thing, I would LOVE to time travel myself and writing stories about time travel is the next best thing. But, equally as important, I want my readers to experience the events in history through the eyes of contemporary characters to which they can relate.
My main characters, Kristi (an African American girl from a rich family) and Ty (an orphaned boy from England) are real life kids with real life problems. Kristi is struggling with the divorce of her parents and lashes out in school as a way of getting attention. Ty is an introverted bookworm who deals with bullying and harassment and is unwanted by his step-father after the death of his mother.
The two discover that their eccentric history teacher, Dr. Xavier Arnold, is a direct descendant of General Benedict Arnold, a former patriot who sold out his friends and countrymen by switching to the British side during the Revolutionary War. Xavier Arnold, in an attempt to improve his tainted family name, invented a time machine to go back to the time of the war and assist Benedict in his plans for treachery and make him a hero again, but for the British this time. He drags Kristi and Ty back with him as pawns in his scheme and they have to traverse colonial America to stop Dr. Arnold and force him to return them to their own time.
How did the idea come to you?
I am currently an elementary school principal, but when I came up with the idea, I was a fifth grade teacher. I used novels about specific time periods in history to help the students gain a better understanding of the time periods and the cultures of the people in our social studies curriculum (Sign of the Beaver—frontier life and Native American relations, Rifles for Waite—western theater of the Civil War, etc.). But, beyond Johnny Tremain, I had trouble finding novels about the Revolutionary War for my students. So, I decided to write one of my own.
About how long did it take you to write it? What was your favorite/least favorite part of the process?
My first draft came to me quickly. It took me about six weeks to plan and outline the story. Once I had an outline, it only took me about two months to write my first draft. However, I am a compulsive reviser, so I spent the next eighteen months rewriting and revising before I started submitting. Revising is my favorite part of the whole writing process. In the classroom, I tried impressing upon my students that stories, or any other kind of writing for that matter, are never truly finished and can always be improved upon.
I love how you can simply change a few words or descriptions around to make a story funnier, scarier, happier—whatever-er.
My least favorite part is most definitely the submission process. Trying to boil your story, your baby, down to a few sentences in a query letter that probably won’t get past the cubicle of a college intern in a publishing office or agency is daunting and discouraging. I hate to use the cliché needle in a haystack, but that’s how it feels.
Have you started work on any of the other books in the American Epochs series? Can you tell me anything about those?
The second book, Time Underground, is currently with the editors at my publishers and is due to be released in November of this year. In Time Underground, Kristi finds out that her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave who escaped on the Underground Railroad and survived to sire her family. However, he had a younger brother who attempted to escape with him, but was caught and disappeared from history. Kristi and Ty go to 1858 to find Kristi’s uncle and help him get to the north and safety.
I’m about 25,000 words into the first draft of the third book in the series. My working title is Time to Heal—but I’m not in love with that title yet, so I expect it to change. The third installment is set during the Civil War where Ty works in the hospitals and experiences the horror of Civil War medicine before he’s dropped right on top of Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg and the Confederate assault.
What was it like trying to collaborate factual, historical events to turn them into a fictional, fantasy narrative?
It was very important that my narrative be as historically accurate as possible. As I stated above, I wanted my readers to learn about the historical events while they are reading, so I do a great deal of research before writing and while I’m drafting. I believe the term for it is active history. It’s not a rote recitation of historical events, but a recounting of events through the eyes of characters who do not see the outcomes as predetermined. It’s a fine line to tread, but that makes it all the more fun to write…and hopefully to read.
How do you work with suspended disbelief, making something so fantastical become a believable scenario?
I use some author’s license and try to write in a way that seems believable. My stories are technically science fiction because of the time travel, but they are not traditional sci-fi. I don’t go into extended explanations into the science behind my time machine or the theoretical possibilities of time travel. I think it works because my stories are written from the points-of-view of young characters who don’t really care how they were transported through time, just that they were transported and what they are going to do about it. I count on my readers to use their imaginations while they are reading, giving them an active role in the story instead of a passive one.
When writing a young adult novel, do you have to give your language any special consideration? Is it difficult not to condescend to your intended audience? What do you think is the real difference between YA literature and Adult literature?
My series is meant for a Middle Grade audience (ages 9-14), a step younger than YA. That being said, storytelling is storytelling so I don’t see a whole lot of differences in the language for different intended audiences. Kids are more intuitive than we give them credit for. They know when language and descriptions are condescending and they’ll drop a book much faster than an adult at the first sign of condescension. No middle grade reader would be caught dead reading a “kiddie book”.
I see the major task for any writer, whether he/she is writing MG, YA, or Adult books is the ability to get his/her readers to relate to the characters and the real life issues they face. A story comes alive when the reader can see him/herself in the main characters. Take an adult detective novel, for example. The antagonists often deal with social issues such as alcohol abuse, broken marriages, or kids who won’t talk to them. Adult readers can relate to those issues. YA readers deal with teen angst (do we still call it that???) in their real lives. Many antagonists in YA books deal with questions and decisions about overbearing parents, individuality and independence, an even sex, alcohol, and drug use because those problems/questions are real to YA readers. MG readers worry about their parents’ divorce, bullying, and mean teachers. I see these issues as more innocent, yet no less real to the characters and the readers.
Have your children read Time Traitor? What do they think?
My oldest son is eight and going into the third grade. He has the reading ability to comprehend Time Traitor, but he doesn’t have the background knowledge about the Revolutionary War to truly understand the importance of the events in the book. I’ll wait until he reaches that point in school to let him read it.
What advice would you give to other aspiring writers?
I’ll be cheesy and steal Nike’s motto. Just Do It. Everybody knows someone who wants to write a book someday. And all of those people have real, legitimate reasons for putting it off (jobs, family, time, etc.) But to be a writer, you have to actually sit down and write it. Then rewrite it and rewrite it. You have to understand that you’re going to write a lot of garbage along the way as you learn. But the more you read and the more you write, the better your writing will develop. I’m not aware of any savants who sat down and wrote the Great American Novel on their first shot. You get out what you put in.
Todd McClimans is an elementary school principal and former fifth grade teacher. He holds bachelors degrees in Creative Writing and Elementary Education and master’s degrees in Creative writing and Educational Leadership. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and three young children. A self-styled history buff and fantasy nerd, Todd first became interested in writing about American history when teaching his fifth graders the riveting stories of patriots and their struggle for independence during the Revolutionary War. He aims to bring history to life for young readers by writing stories with a careful mixture of historical fact and fantastical story-telling with characters to which children can relate.Let me introduce you to Gaia. Gaia is a human clone or more aptly, a human garden. She is a twisted, mutilated version of woman with little conventional beauty to behold. Yet there’s a sense of strength in her structure and: the beat of her HEART, the bright BLOOD pumping through her veins and the light yellow aura that floats above her- are riveting. Gaia struggles, as so many main characters do, to find her place in the world.
She is also the main character of my sci-fi script, GAIA, which took first place in The Indie Gathering’s sci-fi feature script contest, one of a couple dozen contests I entered over the past two months or so. The win is my first and a welcomed reprieve from the repeated thrashes of rejection from others.
Admittedly, the validity and usefulness of screenplay contests continues to be debated, especially for any contests other than the “Top 5.” Indeed, as I searched for contests, and weighed the benefits and costs of each, I struggled not to let the naysayers drag me down.
Site after site, person after person, nay after nay; these sounded much like this:
“contests that charge over $25 aren’t worth it”
“any other than the top 5 are a waste of time”
“contests are a waste of time… they won’t help you sell your screenplay”
“contests are good for the ego, but that’s all.”
Of course, some of these comments were by people who had not yet placed in any contest, but not all of them and some were directly from people working within the film industry. Regardless, the impact varied little.
With each nay, my enthusiasm waned, even after my win. That is, until I realized something so profound that when I told Confucius he said, “Do what?” Not really, actually he rolled his eyes and said, “Uh.. duh.” So what is this not-so profound realization?
In the screenwriting world (and in fact, most any artistic industries), a reverberating factor of success seems to be the ability to find like-minded people.
A win may or may not mean you write well, but it means that someone or several “someones” appreciated your writing. It doesn’t matter if they appreciated it because it was “good” writing, or because it was a “good” story or for some other reason. All that matters is that you made that connection. For that win, you “won” someone over, and each contest you enter increases your chance to connect.
Think of these contests as fishing. They take time, money and can be tiring. Sometimes you’ll get a nibble, sometimes a bite, but you won’t get anything if the fish in the lake don’t like your bait. Even the biggest worm won’t hook a fish if the fish in the lake prefer crickets. Thus, for me, these contests are my pole.
I use them to gauge the interest in my bait. What other route offers you so much direct access to such a large, diverse range of people. Whether the judges are members of the Hollywood elite or not, they are people you can connect with.
There are many reasons why cult followings are popular and movies that have them are ultimately successful. Not every success is based on the size of the catch. Sometimes it’s taste that counts.
And as I consider the value of screenwriting contests, I remind myself also that Indie films and the whole site of Kickstarter are all about funding based upon a connection. Not a network of who you know, but a connection of a shared vision and goal. And isn’t that why we write anyway; to connect with others?
Autumn Whiltshire earned her Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. She writes poetry, short stories and screenplays. Her thesis script, Gaia won first place in The Indie Gathering’s 2014 Sci-Fi Feature category. You can follow Autumn at: http://autumnwhiltshire.wordpress.com/
Recently I shared the news with my Wilkes Creative Writing “family” that my short screenplay The Importance of Sex Education was chosen as one of six finalists in the D.C. Shorts Film Festival Screenwriting Contest. I had just sat down to a late Chinese Buffet lunch with my mom when the festival organizer called me to inform me of the selection. I was so thrilled I couldn’t eat another bite. (I had to pay the full “all-you-can-eat” price anyway.)
When I was asked by The Write Life to speak of my experience of submitting to festivals, I hesitated because in order to share such an experience in its entirety, I must admit to all the rejections!
As a burgeoning writer/filmmaker, one is inevitably guaranteed more rejections than acceptances, and while this is well-known, the rejections still sting. But, the stings lessen with experience and a good acceptance letter can numb any number of past or future stings. I am lucky that with this script, I only received one rejection prior to placing in this contest. But, I’ll be honest, it wasn’t exactly the same script.
I had entered this script into another festival some months ago. While it received favorable remarks, it did not advance into the final rounds. When I received the rejection, I went back and reworked it. Though I had shared it with a few people the first round, this time I found new readers. I did some polishing (mostly cutting) and then I sent it off again to the D.C. Shorts competition and this time, it advanced.
Of course, the standard advice is to not send work off to start with until you think it’s “perfect. “ For me, that would mean never sending anything. I have to let go and send my work off in the belief that it is ready. But, if it comes back, that gives me the guilt-free excuse to reopen it and piddle some more, or on rare occasions confirm that it’s as good as I can get it. I rarely resubmit the same exact work after a rejection.
As for screenwriting contests, there is an on-going controversy as to whether or not they are worth the effort. After all, there are hundreds of contest winners every year that don’t get their scripts optioned or produced, and tons of terrible scripts that DO get produced. I tend to think that for me, as someone who is early in her career, it’s worth the effort for networking, and for resume building. Of course, the networking aspect only makes sense for someone who actually means to attend the festivals. Festivals that are film and screenwriting are of particular interest to me because it’s an opportunity to meet other industry types and not just screenwriters.
The D.C. Shorts competition was for shorts only. I like short film festivals as you often get to meet filmmakers early in their careers as well. Some would scoff at the effort and cost of submitting a short film, preferring to submit only feature length in the hopes of getting it sold or produced. But, short scripts also show off writing skills, and for me, the goal is as much to garner notice as a writer as it is to sell any particular script.
Of course, some competitions are more valuable than others and it’s worth it to investigate them before submitting. One thing to consider is the cost versus payoff. How well-known is the festival and how much prestige would participation garner? If accepted, do you get a free pass? And, if so, what kind of conference offerings are there? Is there prize money? (D.C. Shorts offers $2000 production fund to the winner and as a filmmaker, I would like to shoot the script.)
Many script competitions offer coverage (feedback) for a few extra dollars. I’ve not partaken of this option, personally, and probably would not elect to do so unless I knew absolutely who was providing that coverage, and that the person was a true industry professional and not, say, a film school intern. That’s not to say professional coverage services aren’t valuable: I’m just not sold on the value of anonymous festival coverage. There are a few competitions that offer free coverage, though, so of course that is welcome.
As for the festival at hand, the six D. C. Shorts screenplay finalists will be read publicly September 19 at the U.S. Navy Memorial Heritage Center in Washington D.C. The winner will be chosen by audience vote at the end of the event. My script, The Importance of Sex Education is a short comedy that follows 12-year old Adeline as she fumbles her way into puberty in 1975 with some embarrassingly errant assumptions about sex.
L. Elizabeth Powers
L. Elizabeth Powers received her MFA from Wilkes University’s Creative Writing department in 2013. Before that, she worked for 12 years in feature film visual effects. She currently works as a freelance artist, and as a designer for Etruscan Press. Her short film, Killing Time, was a finalist in the Louisiana Film Prize 2012, and she has had work published in Poetry Quarterly, Red River Review, Every Day Poets, The Germ and Big Country Magazine. A story she penned while at Wilkes can be read in the current issue of Belle Reve Literary Journal. She has worked in Shreveport and New Orleans, LA for the past few years, though she is currently helping out on her family’s farm in Texas.
Contact Information:
http://www.lelizabethpowers.com
I mean this in 2 ways:
1) to save the essays from the dumpster:
Roughly 12 million essays are written every year by college freshman comp students, and, by my educated guess, roughly 12 million of them are eventually trashed, in one way or another. Once graded, they’re eternally stored away in folders, on backup discs, in the dusty closets of hard drives, they’re cheerfully deleted, or thrown away. As a recent MFA grad entering into my first instructional position, the inevitable doom of my students’ papers made me question the point of it all. Here I am preaching audience audience audience, know your audience, and they’re thinking dumpster dumpster dumpster, what’s the quickest route to the dumpster.
2) to save the essays from becoming worthy of the dumpster:
What’s even sadder is that many—if not most—freshman papers deserve their wasteful fate. If they were written for the dumpster to begin with, then the dumpster can have ‘em—who’d want to read them? To “save the essays” we need first to inspire essays that are worth saving.
I do not mean to say that all college freshman writing is bad. Certainly, there are a few exceptions in every comp class—self-motivated students with a predilection for writing. Ask any English prof, though, and you’ll hear a dismal testament of the student majority. Comp students just don’t care that much. And why should they? No one’s ever going to read their writing, right? Except the instructor, who is paid to be sympathetic to shitty work and polite in criticizing it. If they can get past the instructor, then they’re golden, and they know it.
In his article English Compositionism as Fraud and Failure, veteran instructor Jeffrey Zorn describes the field of composition pedagogy as his “adrift, embarrassing, infuriating, failing profession.” I agree.
Many experts blame the students: a spoiled, lazy, inept generation. Seriously? Take a look on YouTube—the greatest showcase of talent anywhere ever. Read the quippish genius happening all over Facebook and Twitter and in the captions of memes. People are brilliant . . . when they care—the same ones texting in the back of class and citing Wikipedia on their research papers.
Perhaps the predominant view is to blame lackadaisical and feeble professors for skirting extensive feedback because it’s either too much work or they don’t want to upset students and face grade disputes, that instructors need to push harder, be tougher. I used to share this outlook, before I experienced how poorly it works.
You can drill students until their typing-fingers blister, but they won’t learn until they want to. To an unreceptive student, intensive line editing and heavy-handed feedback teaches only how to imitate your correctness. So yes, you can improve a student’s writing by telling them what they did wrong and how to fix it. They’ll fix it, and it will be better, just like a patient takes pills to get better. You gave the student a fish. If they don’t care, all your brilliant advice goes into the dumpster along with their papers the second they see their final grade. Try as you might, you cannot teach a student how to fish until s/he’s hungry enough to need to learn.
How hard is it, anyway, to learn active voice? Every writing text and a thousand websites explain it pretty clearly. If you don’t care, you’ll struggle with it all semester, and then you’ll use it (badly) in the future because your professor told you to and you assume it’s always best. If you care, you’ll look it up and teach it to yourself in an afternoon, and when you use it in the future it will be because you want an active agent in your sentence in lieu of stating existence or victimizing your subject. Yes, it’s vital to teach craft, but it’s futile to shout it into deaf ears.
In my (fairly virgin) view, issues of craft are secondary to the primary concern: saying something worth reading—eschewing vapid bullshit. I’ll get 20 papers on gay marriage rights, 30 on marijuana laws. Gay marriage should be illegal because it’s in the 
Bible. Legalizing weed will stimulate the economy because of the tax surplus. Every round of papers amounts to a grand collection of other people’s ideas. The papers are so fluffed and formulaic and monotonous and trite that offering feedback is an often worthless endeavor. You can’t polish a turd, as the saying goes. More aptly, you can’t edit substance into a vacuous composition.
Editors won’t take the time to line edit unless the manuscript is worth the work. Why should teachers? We know how to teach grammar and logic. That’s the easy stuff; it’s concrete. Railing students on passive voice and semicolon use while ignoring the banality of the thesis at best churns out exceptionally active, grammatical writers who actively and grammatically say nothing. I see a greater challenge. How do we teach significance? Passion? Originality? A desire to express oneself, to seek information and self-improve?
Call me a hippy (I’m not), but I believe everyone loves writing, in some form. It’s one of the defining traits of being human. It’s tragic that so many people are growing to hate it. How do you effectively teach someone how to do something they hate? You don’t. Thus, first and foremost, I believe my role as a comp teacher is to tap my students’ natural love of writing to draw out substance. I don’t care if there are a hundred passive constructions. If the core is strong, we have something to work with, and the student will lead the charge if s/he actually wants to make it better.
So how do we teach caring?
I’m asking as much as I’m suggesting. In the past, I’ve tried provocative prompts, personalized assignments, peer evaluations, every manner of bonus offering (this at least gets a response), hard-ass threats (this doesn’t), public challenges, direct communication, the “you’re all geniuses” approach, sardonic humor, harsh criticism, all positive criticism, all negative criticism, extensive feedback, sparse feedback, and on and on. Some methods work better than others, but in the end the papers are compost, and who knows if anything stuck. The core of the problem remains. They’re writing for a grade, not for an audience.
Perhaps the solution, then, is to provide an audience?
This question echoes back to my previous life as a music teacher, where I faced a similar problem. Kids would come into my little guitar closet and genuinely want to learn, but weeks of practicing at home and playing for me and practicing at home and playing for me would gradually suffocate the students’ fire and they’d often quit halfway through. Then I joined the faculty of a progressive school of rock (www.musichouseschool.com, ftr). They held end-of-semester performances, which gave a stage to the students. The same kids who took months to learn half a song were suddenly learning full songs in a week, perfecting them in a few. The difference was staggering.
This past semester, I reflected heavily on my past student rock stars. I wanted to offer a “stage” to my writing students, so I tried something entirely new. I published my students’ writing—like for real (contracts and all). I aimed to kill the arbitrariness of my assignments by providing a real outlet. We worked together toward a common goal. I needed them to write well because their papers would be in a publication associated with my name. They needed to write well if they wanted to get their name in the publication, and to be proud to have other people read it, which gave them an incentive to write beyond the grade. The focus remained on the writing and the publication as much as possible and shifted to grading only when the college demanded it.
Aside from the lectures, which I viewed more like training seminars, class ran like a publication house. I was the editor. They were staff writers. Instead of requiring assignments and arbitrarily grading them, I gave prompts and payouts for those who responded. They chose which prompts they wanted to respond to. The payouts came in the form of “class cash,” which accumulated to determine their final grade (a bit corny, I know, but it gave the realistic feeling that I was paying them for their work, which essentially I was). When they submitted papers, instead of line editing, I played editor and either accepted or rejected their papers. If rejected, I would give a paragraph or two detailing the reason and offer them the chance to resubmit for the next revision period.
Some of the papers I read 3 or 4 times before accepting, and they vastly improved throughout the process. Often, in narrative writing, students would interpret their experiences through sentimental, vague, clichéd language in their early drafts and then gradually comb out the mawkishness in trade for original expression that conveyed their significant and inimitable human plight. Many students clearly learned something about themselves through revising: that they weren’t just “a broken heart” or “an ordinary kid”—they saw that they were distinct and complex people living complex lives and that personal writing is a process of unraveling and understanding who they are and what made them. I’ll take that over active voice any day.
At the end of the semester, the students took roles as editors to address the minutia—at the point where it’s actually appropriate to deal with such issues. The entire class came together to edit and produce all the accepted papers into journal form, which now has its own website (www.thefreshmanreview.com) and is available in print through lulu.com.
The semester was not without its problems (I have many tweaks planned next time around), but for the first time, on a large scale, I saw students take genuine interest in their work—especially during the production process. When I turned the responsibility over to them, they took off. Apparently, real responsibility incites real effort.
My publication, however, is a temporary fix. It’s absurd for me to create an external publication company just to get my students to care. If everyone did this, there’d be 100,000 new publications just to cover freshman writing, and the overabundance of publications would become another type of dumpster. I believe firmly, now, that students need a real audience to develop writing skills, and I think colleges should be the ones to provide it. They could run a freshman publication within the college for the best papers—perhaps through the school paper or university press. Or, professors from different fields could commission papers from freshman students: allow them to provide real-world, needed research. Freshman writers are a valuable untapped resource. Use them. Save them.
Let their 12,000,000 papers count for something.
Photo by Shauna Yorty
Jeff Minton lives in Camp Hill, PA, where he divides his time between his wife and three boys, his writing, composing music, disc golf, and teaching English at Elizabethtown College and Harrisburg Area Community College. Recently, his fiction won finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award and he presented a panel titled “Orchestration for Writers 101” at the 2014 AWP Conference. He holds an MFA in Creative writing from Wilkes University.
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