He Wrote She Wrote

Hi everyone. I'm taking Samantha's place today. She's off celebrating her birthday. WooHoo!!!! Happy Birthday, Samantha.

I'm going to keep this one short. (I hope.) I still have a some writing on the WIP to do tonight. If you saw those goals I posted over at Random Ravings, then you know I've got 325 words to do tonight. Yes, it is 11:02, and I haven't written the first one. But... I did run tonight and listen to some B.B. King. My WIP's hero is into the blues. He suggested I revisit the King.

But, I digress....

The title of this blog is He Wrote She Wrote. He Wrote She Wrote is actually the writing workshop blog of Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. She writes romance novels of which Alyson and Katrina are big fans. He writes thrillers. They teamed up and wrote Don't Look Down and are now working on Agnes and the Hitman. While Don't Look Down took me just a bit to get into, I really loved it. I'll definitely read Agnes.

It's designed to be a year-long workshop on fiction writing. One read of the syllabus and I bookmarked the blog. They've broken down what they're covering into several big sections: The Heart of the Story, Point of View, Character, Plot, Business, Unity, & Editing. The blog just started at the first of this year. Feel free to join me in weekly reads. I figure it can't hurt since between them, they have enough books to fill a couple of shelves at the local book store.

Bob opens with the one sentence idea: "Much like the character Tim Robbins plays in Robert Altman’s THE PLAYER, I would tell writers they had to be able to say what their book was about in 25 words or less. Not only that, but it better be a sentence that sends a ‘shiver’ down the spine of the person who hears it."

Jenny in her responding post says, "My process is that the Girls in the Basement send up some good stuff and I write it down, no idea where it’s going. The story builds in my brain as I write, there are some surprises, I trip over things, and then it starts to take shape, but I couldn’t come up with a One Sentence Idea before I begin to write if you put a gun to my dog’s head."

It's kind of like a romance novel already. Lot's of conflict. If for nothing other than that, I'll continue to read.

This is really good stuff. Why?
A man and a woman with very differing genres decide to write novels together. They have completely different ideas about how it should be done, and yet what they write is pretty darn good. Why wouldn't I read that?

I've already drawn some good lessons:
1) No one way is right.
2) Men and women really do see things differently.
3) Eventually, like in all good partnerships (whether lovers or business partners or book collaborators), a few universally agreed upon truths are uncovered: "...but we both agree: at some point you have to sit down and say, “What the hell is this book about?”

Go Jenny. Go Bob. I'm along for the ride.