Self-Indulgent Writer's Workshop
May 13-15
May 13:
3:00-4:00 Eschewing Genre Fiction Seminar and Mixer
Get to know your fellow writers while disdaining their work. "I'm still waiting for a historical novel with any kind of artistic validity." "Anyone who wins the Hugo and Nebula award must be doing something wrong." Bring your own sherry.
10:00-11:30 Make a Note of It
You should include references to your favorite music in your novels. It allows you to demonstrate your exquisite musical taste while simultaneously alienating 99% of your readership.
"We're an american band."
--Grand Funk Railroad
Brother Vittorio shook his head impatiently. "The inquisition need not be concerned with the theology of Brother John. He is no more an Arian heretic than I am." Brother Vittorio slipped his headphones back over his ears. "Now if you don't mind, I'd like to listen to the rest of Nick Cave's mind-blowing 'The Firstborn is Dead'".
4:00-6:00 Immoderately Long Descriptions of Clothes
The people want long descriptions of clothes! They told us.
May 14:
9:00-12:00 What the Writers in the Book about Writers Writing are Writing About
Every further level of recursion will win you a special prize!
1:00-2:00 Cafeteria-Style Lunch and Incest Fiction Workshop
2:30-4:00 Pastiching 101
Who to pastiche: James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov. Who not to pastiche: Isaac Asimov, Stan Lee.
4:00-5:00 Writing and Technology
New developments in technology allow you to have an author pic that's bigger than the book!
6:00 Bonfire and Self-Loathing Seminar
Bring the manuscript you'd like to symbolically destroy. It's not indicative of your best work. You're a hack! If Hemingway were alive today, his disdain for you would be palpable. S'mores will be made.
May 15:
9:00-12:00 Mutual Backslapping
12:30-2:30 Take Away the Tab Key
Paragraph breaks are for introducing new ideas. Modern literary theorists regard them as a crutch for beginning writers. Opine the theorists, "what was so wrong with the first idea, that you couldn't go on about it for 400 pages?" Other crutches include narrative structure and the letter E.
2:45 Calling Writing "My Craft"
2:30-3:30 My Love Affair with Words
Speaker: Robert James Waller
In Bridges of Madison County, the main character, Robert Kincaid, kept a list of his favorite English words taped to his wall. Waller reads a passage from his unfinished sequel, in which Kincaid has sex with the letter D in "rudimentary".
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