week twelve

During this meeting we read a few books, three of which I am taking home to read, caught up on a few posts in the blog, planned some of the story, and wrote about three paragraphs.

The books are titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn, which is a series of different stories and poems, How to Grow a Novel, which is all about the problems and mistakes that a writer has while trying to write a story, and how to overcome them, written by Sol Stein (it's really good) and the last book, Neuromancer, is written by a man in Vancouver, Canada named William Gibson.

One of the other things we talked about is dialogue. One thing I learned is to often be indirect when the characters are responding to each other, and there should be tension between the speakers. It should be kind of exciting. You also can't answer all the readers questions to build suspense (avoid questions.) One of the examples from how to grow a novel, from the section which talks about how the answers need to be indirect, as to surprise the reader, is as follows.

She: I see you're feeling better.
He: Since when can you see what I feel?
She:I thought this was going to be a peaceful discussion.
He: That was yesterday.

This is a good example of being surprising and oblique.