Writing Critiques Offered at Write on the River Conference

Bill Johnson will be offering manuscript critiques as part of the Write on the River conference. Bob Dugoni is the featured speaker and Rachel Letofsky is a featured Literary Agent.

Write On The River is North Central Washington’s only writing conference. Two days of content-packed workshops with professional editors, successful agents, bestselling authors and nationally-acclaimed speakers, Write On The River is the best way to hone your craft, build your dream and move your writing forward. Whether your goal is to be a published author, write articles for a local magazine, develop your poetry, or simply write for your own enjoyment, Write On The River has something for you. Held every May on the beautiful Wenatchee Valley College in Wenatchee, Washington, Write On The River is a writing conference not to be missed!

The conference gives you a unique opportunity to learn from the best in a casual, intimate atmosphere. There are plenty of opportunities to rub elbows with publishing professionals, get one-on-one writing advice from successful authors, bond with fellow writers, and pitch your project to a literary agent or publishing editor. Write On The River can really move your writing life forward in an inspiring way!

The 2016 Conference is May 13, 14 & 15. With a world-class faculty and renowned writing instructors from all over the world, it promises to be a highlight of your writing year. Attendees will also have the opportunity to pitch their projects to a literary agent and a book publisher. Click HERE to learn about 2016’s exciting line-up of workshops, and HERE to meet our esteemed 2016 Conference faculty.

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For reviews of popular novels that explore principles of storytelling, check out A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, available on Amazon's Kindle and available on Barnes and Noble's Nook and on Apple via Smashwords.

Conveying a Character's Journey on the First Page of a Novel

Notes on Good Grief, a novel by Lolly Winston

by Bill Johnson

I teach that a story creates movement and the movement transports an audience. In many of the unpublished novels I read, I'm often 40 pages into a manuscript before I have any idea of a main character's journey. In some cases, I have to read to the end of a novel to understand that journey. This puts me (and readers) in the unfortunate position of needing to keep track of all the details about a character while I wait for some sense of purpose to become apparent. This makes reading a novel work.

Lolly Winston's novel Good Grief has a structure that clearly conveys the stages of grief that a young woman goes through when her husband dies and leaves her a widow. This external framework communicates that the novel has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. From its opening lines, the story has a destination.

Each stage of the main character's journey is divided into sections. The chapters in Part One are about denial, oreoes, anger, depression, escrow, and ashes. Each chapter that follows is about the main character's journey in dealing with her grief over her husband's death. The title, Good Grief, speaks to the narrator learning that there can be good grief (which revolves around passing through the stages of grief) and bad grief (getting stuck on the journey).

A review of the opening of Good Grief conveys how a main character's journey is set out.

The opening line:

How can I be a Widow?

The answer to this question comes in the opening paragraphs as the narrator sits in a grief support group. In a few paragraphs, the narrator explains why she's in the group.

My name is Sophie and I've joined the grief group because...well, because I sort of did a crazy thing. I drove my Honda through our garage door.

What's important about these lines is they show the narrator is not only in grief, she's being overwhelmed by grief. What set up the garage accident was an irrational thought that she needed to get into the house quickly to tell her husband something. Except he's deceased. She's in denial.

Continuing in a few paragraphs:

Maybe later I'll tell the group how I dream about Ethan every night. That he's still alive in the eastern standard time zone and if I fly to New York, I can see him for another three hours.

The narrator tries to deal with her grief by going back to work, but she quickly finds herself overwhelmed. In the past, when she felt overwhelmed, she called her husband. The chapter ends with these lines.

The cursor on my computer screen pulses impatiently, and the red voice mail light on my phone flashes. My stomach growls and my head throbs. But I can't call my husband. Because, here's the thing: I am a widow.

She has started to come out of her denial about her husband's death. The first chapter is a clearly defined step on her journey through grief.

Each chapter continues that journey until the narrator has passed through good grief to being whole again.

Highly recommended for writers who want to learn about structure from reading a well-written novel.

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Bill Johnson is the author of A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling. Promise is about the mechanics of telling a story, Deep Characterization (a section of the book) is about how the mechanics break down when people write stories to process their personal issues in life). The Spirit of Storytelling is about how great storytelling relates to the conscious, subconscious, and superconscious minds. Available at Amazon  and Smashwords.