West Los Angeles Writing and Critique Workshop starts Thursday!

Our West Los Angeles Writing and Critique Workshop begins on Thursday!

LAwritersgroup.com has been running writers groups and creative writing workshops throughout the greater Los Angeles area since 2003. We hire moderators to run these groups who have years of experience giving writers feedback on their novels, screenplays, essays, children's books, short fiction stories, memoirs and even on poetry. Our moderators are chosen because they have experience working directly with creative writers and they understand how to give supportive cross-genre feedback that will leave you excited by the possibilities of your story and hungry to go home and rewrite your project, if it needs rewriting.

We also create new stories / writing in our groups through improvisational writing exercises given as writing prompts by our group moderators that are hand-picked by that moderator based on the needs of individual writers in the group to help elevate your prose, theme, dialogue, character development and much more. Because of this, no two groups are the same, which is why we have so many people who repeat group after group (plus returning writers get the returning member discount!). Our rules for the critique process have been developed over years of working in this group setting in order to keep the critique process constructive and positive.

Critique is not only good for the person receiving critique. It also benefits the critiquer. Listening to our moderators and other members give feedback on various writing styles, stories, and genres, helps those listening elevate their level of critique and their ability to critique their own stories as they write them. While our groups are not writing classes per se, and we have no lecture portion of the evening, a great deal of experiential learning, often customized for the individual group, takes place during our workshops. Even if a writer never brings in a story for feedback, they grow from a craft perspective just by listening and participating in the process.

Please visit http://www.lawritersgroup.com or email lawritersgroup@gmail.com for information or questions about our writers groups.

Hansel and Gretel

Based on my last post, I reread Grimm's Hansel and Gretel and I'm now traumatized. The Dad lets his wife dump his kids in the forrest to starve to death and when the kids survive and outsmart the child-eating witch then find their way back home with riches, mom is dead and codependent wimpy-ass dad gets to be rich??? How the did I have fond feelings for that story? Humpf.

Photo is in Public Domain: http://commons.wikimedia.org/

wiki/File:DBP_1961_369_Wohlfahrt_H%C3%A4nsel_und_Gretel.jpg

Grimm's Fairy Tales

Huge list of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Great Sunday Reading.

Ten Elements of the Intellectual Thriller

Here's a fabulous list that describes the ten important elements of writing an intellectual thriller.

Our Current Writing Craft Book Club Book Selection

Read along with us and participate in person or in our online discussion on our Writing Craft Book Club Meetup page

Who or what influenced you to be a writer?

Someone on one of my LinkedIn groups posed the question, "Who or what influenced you to be a writer?" and it elicted some fantastic answers so I thought I'd pose the question here.

For me (Nicole), here is a slightly longer version of my answer:

My writing influence stemmed from desperation and the love of a good friend. Thanks to a series emotionally blindsiding tragedies, I found myself needing to retreat and process what was happening around me. My abused friends enjoyed the brunt of my venting via email and instant message, and one valuable friend in particular changed my life when he complimented my writing and told me I should be a writer. That was the first time I'd ever considered becoming a writer. He encouraged me to take writing classes at a local university extension program. At that point, not only had I never been exposed to writing classes, I didn't even know they'd existed. When we parked in the campus parking structure, and got out of the car, I had what I now understand was a panic attack. I'd had negative scholastic experiences and just being on a campus elicted a great deal of anxiety. Still does, actually. He took my hand anyway and walked me there, steadfastly reassuring me that it would be okay. He was right. It was. If he hadn't been the Gayle to my Oprah, I wouldn't be a writer today. Thanks Geo!

Should you read in the genre you write?

Someone recently asked me why it's important to read in the genre they write, i.e., if you write science fiction, should you read science fiction, if you are a memoirist, should you read other memoirs?

In response, I asked him if he had a day job.

He did.

I asked him what he did.

He was an engineer.

I then asked, "If you'd never opened a physics book, how would that affect your job?"

He replied, "Well, I'd loose a great deal of feel for what it is I do and why things work."

EXACTLY.

Reading in your genre is not setting yourself up as a plagiarist. It is not distracting you from your writing. It is your homework, your business. If you are writing Fantasy fiction, you need to read as much Fantasy as possible. That is your job. You need to understand the conceits and structure of your genre. You need to know what's already out there. You need a background sense of what you should be aiming for in your finished product. You need to understand how to incorporate theme and foreshadowing into your prose. You need to understand how to organically set up a fantastical world. You can't work in a field you know nothing about. Well, perhaps you can, but you will likely be inefficient and ineffective.

I've heard people give writers advice to avoid reading about a subject they are writing, or in a genre they are writing because it will 'unduly influence their writing, and that they need to remain original.' I can't disagree more with this statement. This is like telling a painter never to look at other paintings. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Studying other painters is part of what makes someone a great painter.

It's okay to be influenced. All artists have influences who have inspired their work. This is not a bad thing. This is an imagination booster, not a route to being a copycat. This is true even for screenwriters.

Read in your genre.

Photo by Lienhard Schulz (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons