Structure, Marketability, and Other Screenwriting Secrets

From her experience writing both screenplays and fiction, Sarah Archer has learned that there is a whole lot of overlap, lessons and practices all writers can use to improve their work. She'll talk with us about crossing over, how she utilized skills she developed as a screenwriter in writing her first novel, The Plus One. In addition, there’s help to come here on the importance of building a story structure, showing vs. telling, writing with economy, and hooking readers/viewers early. Sarah will do a deep dive into the process of outlining, from brainstorming with a final, marketable product in mind; to chaining scenes together in a way that drives momentum; to leaving room for creative liberty along the way. Throughout the discussion, she'll draw on examples from The Plus One as well as other novels and films.

About Sarah Archer

Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One (2019), was published in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. Archer is a Black List Screenwriting Mini-Lab fellow who has had material produced for Comedy Central, has published fiction and poetry in numerous literary magazines, and has placed in competitions including the Tracking Board’s Launch Pad. After working in TV and film development in Los Angeles, she moved between six cities in three countries in the course of a few years. She lives in the Charlotte area and is a member of the Charlotte Writers Club.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021, 6:30 p.m. 
Critique Group Creation and Support
Location to be posted when available

Finding the Right Way to Tell Your Story

You have a story. You've been thinking about it for a long time, turned it over and over in your head, sketched out the characters, added detail as the months go on. But is having “the story” enough? Are you sure you've found the right way to tell your story? Megan Miranda contends there are five or ten different ways to tell the same story, each of which will reveal something unique as the structure, perspective, or themes change. All of her books have taken a different structural approach. All the Missing Girls, the story of two young women who go missing a decade apart, is told in reverse. The story in Fragments of the Lost circles around found objects, while the chapters in The Girl from Widow Hills are interspersed with news clips that create suspense and drive the story forward. Megan's most recent book, Such a Quiet Place, uses a community bulletin board to heighten tension and reveal another layer of the setting. Recognizing the importance of finding "the right way," she often rewrites projects to make sure she has found the best possible way to tell any given story—and she will share her secrets with us.

About Megan Miranda

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls, The Perfect Stranger, The Last House Guest, The Girl from Widow Hills, and most recently, Such a Quiet Place. She is also the author of several books for young adults, including Fracture, Hysteria, Vengeance, and Soulprint. She grew up in New Jersey, attended MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children.

Taking That Final Step toward Publication

You’re a writer. You’ve worked hard and for a very long time to get your project ready for publication. But do you in fact have a professional-looking work that will draw the attention of an agent or, if you opt for self-publishing, generate the kind of reviews that will sell books in the numbers you’ve imagined? Beyond writing, it is vitally important that would-be authors understand the publishing industry, and the fine points agents and publishers expect to see before they commit to putting time and money into your book. Betsy Thorpe will explain what different kinds of editors do: proofreaders, copy-editors, sensitivity editors, developmental editors. She’ll lay out in more detail the ways a developmental editor can help with observations on the amount and flow of information you’ve included, your style, use of words, even the number of chapter divisions. She’ll explain how a developmental editor can help you develop your characters more fully, refine the hero’s journey, enliven your dialogue, use setting effectively, maintain the pace of your story—and more.

About Betsy Thorpe

Betsy Thorpe, a veteran of twenty years and more in the book business, has seen it all from behind the editor’s desk. She worked briefly after college as a “Rover” at Condé Nast and worked on projects at all their magazines, left to follow her heart into the book world as an editorial assistant at Atheneum Books where she worked with Lee Goerner. Moving up, she worked as an assistant editor at Harper Collins where Janet Goldstein schooled her in what it takes to be a great editor, and she later followed her mentor to Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House. In time, she went on to become health and parenting editor at John Wiley & Sons. Since leaving New York she has worked as a freelancer, co-writing books, editing for individuals, and working for corporate clients.

Betsy lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with two daughters and a giant rescue dog named Charlie. She helped to found the Charlotte chapter of the Women’s National Book Association and fundraises for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, hoping they will find a cure for the millions like her daughter who suffer from Type 1 Diabetes.

From the Outside In or the Inside Out: Organizing Your Book of Poems

How do you put a book of poems together? We’ll explore different ways of organizing your book – whether it be through writing with a specific idea from the outset or by discovering the intrinsic connections between poems you have already written.

We’ll explore different ways poets have organized their books: through form (Terrence Hayes’ Wind in a Box), through place (my most recent book, From the Hotel Vernon); through time (Ed Sanders’ 1968), and through a combination of things like form, personal events, and popular culture (Victoria Chang’s Obit).

We’ll turn then to discovering connections between poems you already have. We’ll talk about imagery, metaphor, repetition and key poems that might help you see and develop the book that is already there. We’ll discuss ways to see with an editor’s eye through examples of books that are organized from the inside out (Lucille Clifton’s Book of Light).

Finally, once you have a group of 48-70 pages of poetry (the typical range of a book of poems), how do you organize it? What goes where and why? Beyond order, we will also talk about things like titles, the audience in your mind, and how to get the best help possible from your writing community.

About Lea Graham

A poet and essayist, an editor and a translator, Lea Graham was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up in Northwest Arkansas. She divides her time now between Kingston, New York and Conway, Arkansas, a settled life after years moving between four states and as many foreign countries. She is an Associate Professor of English at Marish College in New York where she has been on the faculty since 2007.

Graham is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019), Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), and three chapbooks, Spell to Spell (above/ground Press, 2018), This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press, 2016), and Calendar Girls (above/ground Press, 2006). Most recently, she edited a collection of essays honoring poet Michael Anania, From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania. (MadHat Press, 2021).

Her poems, reviews, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous journals including: Dogwood Plume, The Southern Humanities Review, The Arkansas Review, Orange Blossom Review, Milk Magazine, and In/Filtration: Anthology of Innovative Hudson Valley Poetics. Current projects include Curiosity road, a book of travel essays, and a poetry manuscript In Transit which focuses on the histories of travel.

Conquering Self-Doubt When You Sit Down to Write

Whether you’re writing memoir or essays, fiction or poetry—whether you’re a beginning writer or have been writing for years—you’ve probably experienced, at some point, almost debilitating doubts. Suddenly, you think, “I’m just not a writer. I can’t do it.” Though she has been writing for 55 years and has seven books to her credit, Judy Goldman knows that feeling. What she has discovered is that self-doubt is a sign your work is taking on its own life, becoming bigger than what you had imagined. Judy will talk about the tricks she has learned to turn self-doubt into writing success. She’ll talk about pushing on, knowing you can’t actually get everything right. You do your work in the hopes of coming close. She’ll explain how to discover what makes your writing different from anything else you’ve ever read, how to write the story only you can write.

About Judy Goldman

Judy Goldman is the author of seven books – three memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry. Her new memoir, Child, will be published Mother’s Day, 2022. Her most recent book, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap (published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) was named one of the best books of 2019 by Real Simple magazine. Together also received a starred review from Library Journal. Her first memoir, Losing My Sister, was a finalist for both SIBA’s Memoir of the Year and ForeWord Review’s Memoir of the year. She received the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction, as well as the three prizes awarded for a poetry book by a North Carolinian and Silverfish Review Press’s Gerald Cable Poetry Prize. She received the Hobson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Fortner Writer and Community Award for “outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger community,” the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College, and the Beverly D. Clark Author Award from Queens University. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Washington Post, USA Today, Charlotte Observer, Real Simple, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She and her husband have lived in Charlotte for 54 years.

The most important detail of Judy’s writing life? The very first prize she won was the Charlotte Writers Club poetry contest. 

AT A GLANCE - The Entire 2021-2022 CWC Main Activities by Month

Click  HERE  to get printable 2021-2022 At a Glance Club Activity Calendar

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