Middle scenes (beginning and the end of the middle)
This weekend has been totally awesome! I attended a Novelist’s Boot Camp with Kim Wilkins at the Queensland Writers Centre. I’m going to break this post into two parts as if this is something you might be interested in attending, I don’t want it to be too long. I’d hate you to lose interest because this boot camp is just too damn good to not be talked about. It was Intense. We started on Friday evening, finishing Sunday evening. We were in lock down at Boggo Road Gaol! Nah – I’m kidding, if only! How cool would that have been? We all certainly thought it was a great idea 
Personally, I respond well to boot camps when it comes to writing. I survived Clarion South 2007 and loved it. You can read about my experience here One of my Clarion stories ‘Seduced by Colour’ has just won second prize in a US writing competition and another ‘Sacred Fire’ won two Honorable Mentions with two US writing publishing houses. In 2010, I embarked on an intense workshop in playwriting with Alex Broun The play I wrote that weekend ‘The Corpse cannot Play’ went from a ‘Wildcard’ performance to being in the top ten Gala/Final night at the Judith Wright Centre. You can read about my experience with the Short + Sweet Theatre here.
So who knows what might come out of this weekend, a published novel perhaps? Wouldn’t that be bliss.
This weekend was a total buzz as we planned and conceptualised our novels and found ways through our individual barriers. We were all in the plotting stage of the novel and at varying degrees of how much had been written, but we all had one thing in common: we were all at the stage where we needed intervention. Kim Wilkins to the rescue! Dr Kim is not only a brilliant teacher, she is passionate about writing which comes from the heart and touches everyone in the room. Her ability to share knowledge in a way that feels real, believable and doable is astonishing. She always finds a way to connect with each and every individual where you leave the class getting it and not scratching your head going: WHAT THE…
Dr Kim shares practical techniques to get us back in touch, back in love with our stories, and by planning which enables us to work through the middle and move into the home run with an excited and unstoppable passion to get to the end.
World building (shocking example of my world) cannot draw to save myself)
From my experience, writing the beginning and the ending is reasonably easy, but writing the middle can be really tough. Just what do you put in the middle to keep the reader engaged while you move the story forward to its ultimate conclusion? Kim showed us how to break this down into bite size and manageable chunks and of course planning and writing in chronological order. This doesn’t work for everyone – but whether you prefer this method of writing a book or not – it certainly is a guaranteed method of finishing a book. I know from first-hand experience with my own resistance to this method, all those moons ago, that this is the only way I managed to get to the finish line with my last two books. (My unfinished novel still sits in the bottom drawer).
Finishing the first one may have been a fluke, but the second one I know I finished because I had a plan. I’m not suggesting great books aren’t written organically because I know they are, but I am suggesting that this is a guaranteed method of getting to the end quickly.
So if I’ve finished two books already why did I need to attend a novelist’s boot camp?
You can find the answer to this question in ‘The Novelist’s Boot Camp – Part II’ – Monday 6th February, 2012.
Kudos to Meg Vann for adding value to the class with her knowledge and expertise particularly in the crime genre and to the Queensland Writers Centre for putting such a great course together.
Midnight rambler has mapped out the middle scenes and made major headway on the world building
