Writing at JCC

I think we had fun.

This was quite a class -- folks from varying places and backgrounds with one thing in common -- the desire to write a book.

Oh, and what an assortment of ideas and characters!  

• A high powered, wise-cracking female executive with ninja skills and a house husband whose skills may exceed hers
•  A creepy, affectless serial killer and a troubled young woman with intuitive profiling chops 
• A man, facing his own mortality and determined to leave a legacy of family memories to his children and grandchildren 
• An adult son struggling to come to grips with his relationship to his father and with the social mores of his small Southern town
• the first female captain of a mission to Mars, carrying a priest and a trio of nuns (all Korean) to minister to the settlers (there are also companion rabbits) 
• a little boy whose world morphs into a wonderland as he travels deeper into a familiar forest
• and a single mother in a dead end job in a sewing plant, struggling to survive and to understand her coworkers

We covered Character, Setting, Dialogue, Plot, Flashbacks, and a whole lot more. 

They had assignments like:

• Write about your main character from the point of view of someone who hates him/her.
• Show your character at an emotional low-point and make us aware of the problems facing him/her.
• Write the copy that will go on the back cover of your novel It should intrigue the reader without giving away the ending.
• Write a dialogue in which one character's thoughts are at odds with his/her words.
• And lots more.

At the end of the week they had nearly a dozen scenes, ready to be fitted into the framework of a novel.

I'm confident some fine books will come out of this extraordinary class!