Tuesday, July 22, 2014

#Grand Lake Retreat Lighthouse Writers Workshop

Besides reading and revising my own work, I spent the yearly retreat writing character sketches and reading
poetry. I also paid particular attention to campers dialogue, including my own. My old Denver writing group told me that "I need to write dialogue the way people speak."  For a week before the retreat, I wrote down much of what I said. Turns out that I speak in monologues, which is so sad for the people who have to listen to me. I still believe that the family in my newest novel, "Funny is Not Enough," do not interrupt each other often because the mother character hates anyone interrupting her, though she is the queen of interrupting others. My novel turns around control, which brings out all of the character's idiosyncratic and inconsistent behavior. It's fun to see what these characters will do next.

Here's the rough synopsis:

Funny is not Enough 
Violet moves back home with her parents as she waits for her Peace Corps assignment.  She expected to go immediately in to the Peace Corps after graduation, but life had other plans.  During Violet’s year long stay back at home, she comes across scrapbooks, diaries, and other mementoes of her mother’s past.  Violet knows that her mother, Jennifer's, life must have been an extremely unusual life, or else her mother's past was a fabrication Jennifer needed to reinvent herself. Violet had always challenged her mom to write a memoir, but every time Jennifer started to write her feelings would overwhelm her and she simply could not write her story. So Violet takes it upon herself to clandestinely research and write her mother’s story in one year, having no idea that this plan would take both her, and her mother, on another path altogether.

Read this blog about the writers retreat:
http://lighthouseblog.org/2014/07/21/what-happens-in-grand-lake/

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