Carol and I left this spectacular mountain aerie yesterday after 4 intense and wonderful days with a Powerful Narrative workshop of 11 fine writers.
The iPhone photo above is just a taste of the Wildacres experience. There’s a view like this everywhere you look, unless the mountains are fogged in, producing a different, more brooding beauty.
(Cloudy weather also improves the internet reception which, for some reason, falls off drastically when the weather is clear.)
One of the ideas driving the Powerful Narrative is that strong narrative values are like jet fuel for both fiction and nonfiction.
Most fiction writers are intimately familiar with this notion, but it’s a subtler truth for nonfiction writers, many of whom have come out of writing backgrounds that emphasize informational summary.
For this reason our Powerful Narrative workshops are open to writers on either side of the fence. In fact, for 4 days anyway, we remove the fence.
At Wildacres we were a group of 11, all nonfiction writers, as it happened (except for me). It was geat fun to bang home some of the cardinal principles of fiction, such as character development, variations of story anatomy, motive-driven decision/action, conflict, pacing, crisis/climax, resolution, macro and micro narratives, and so on.
And especially satisfying to me – I managed to convert a few confirmed non-bloggers to a new appreciation for social media. By time we broke up, they were eager to start their first blogs.
We’re home today, and as wonderful as it’s been on the road, I’m happy to be hanging out with our cats again, working on a big computer screen with a nice, fat, dependable broadband connection, and contemplating yet again, for the umpteenth time, my (perhaps mythical) Great Home Office Cleanup.
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