Q. I’ve always wanted to write but somehow never found time. How can I get started? or I’m not a beginner. I’ve had poetry and a short story or two published. What can you offer me? “So You Want To Be a Writer.” An entry-level six week, hands-on course for beginners and those maybe a little beyond. The only pre-requisite for enrollment is the lifelong habit of reading and a desire to get published. We carry no pas-sengers. Students are expected to write 500 words a week. If you object, then I am not the teacher for you. If you tell me you don’t have time, I’ll ask how many hours do you watch TV. As I say in answer to Q. #7, I like to run these classes on the same lines as my live classes at Columbia College. Students are expected to write 500 words a week on assigned fictional topics, thus beginning a habit of discipline. The work is submitted on-line for a round-robin critique by other members of the class, fi-nal critique by me…a summing up in which I will give my own assessment, not only of each student’s work that week, but of the comments others have made. Week One: Rule One – Show, Don’t Tell. The stylistic principle of great modern writers from Flaubert to Hemingway and beyond. Two: Seducing the Reader: more about writing so that s/he becomes your collaborator. (That supposedly old-fashioned virtue, eloquence, may enter here.) Three: Character Development, creating people we care about. This may be merely a simple hooray-for-John-Wayne hero. Or a more complex anti-hero: someone we root for even though s/he would not thank us for our pains. Four: “Write about what you know.” Yes? Was Shakespeare a Prince of Denmark, was Tolstoi a woman? Five: Attention, Please! Finding the kind of narrative hook and pacing that captures and holds the reader’s immediate attention – starting with agents and editors. Love, joy, betrayal, jealousy and hate were what the earliest Greek drama-tists wrote about. So did Shakespeare and we do too. Human nature does not change. The pace we expect to read about it does. Six: ”I just don’t feel like working today.” Like most forms of stalling, writer’s block begins with perfectionism: an ir-rational fear, as if your next sentence will be snatched from your computer in the night and printed for the world to laugh at in tomorrow’s N.Y. Times. One of my goals is to teach you that letting the first draft flow -- no matter how ugly or stupid -- gets it out where it can be worked on. Until that happens, nothing else does. “Books and plays are not written, they are re-written.” As a kind of graduation ceremony, in Week Six students submit re-written versions of an earlier week’s work, demonstrating what they’ve learned. Note: Students can email me questions at any time, so classes are limited to fourteen. These students have first option on repeating if they like or applying for the next level, which is: Bill Manville’s Master Class: by invitation only. A big time Hollywood agent once told me the secret of a good movie story. “Kid,” said Ziggy Ziegler, “it’s John Wayne driving the cattle to Abilene.” We know the goal from the start: get there in time to sell the cattle and pay the mortgage. Along the way, there are picaresque encounters: the hero meets the girl, runs into the bad guys, has a reunion with his drunken father;-- but every day, against all adversity, the herd is that much closer to Abilene. The story progresses in a relentless straight line, with us rooting for big rug-ged John Wayne every step of the way. And it ends with a satisfying tying up of all loose ends: the cattle sold, the bad guys foiled, the girl in John Wayne’s arms. Hooray. We cannot take the analogy too literally. Movies deal with external events, buying our identification with beautiful people, drenching us with music, back-lighting the actors like angels in heaven. Visually, we are easily seduced. (For in-stance, do you think an ugly man can ever be elected President? A fat or forbid-ding woman?) When I was ten years old, my fourth grade teacher, the sainted Miss Agnes Hay, told me this: “Bill, writing is about the Golden Rule. Every book is a varia-tion on what happens when you do unto to others, what happens when you do not.” She was teaching me the importance of character, the weight of moral di-mension, that fiction’s goals are internal. We bond with the characters because the author’s words touch our heart, and by the choices s/he shows us they make. One of the problems I find with unpublished writers is that the picaresque events mentioned so casually above, take over;-- often because they are so in-teresting in themselves, so well written, they seduce the author first of all, and bend the work’s architecture out of shape. Page by page may be terrific but we get confused, and stop caring: the end leaves us with unresolved emotions. If this sounds like you, I know nothing better than a weekly critique by an entire class of your peers, with a final word from me. For advanced students with an ambitious work in progress (or who want to start one). Submit the first ten pages to: bill@writingtogetpublished.com. Class limited to fourteen, by invitation only.

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