Loved the comments from yesterday's post! Please, if you have further thoughts or experiences about workshops that deal with constructing novels (not just short fiction) I'd love to hear from you.
I did indeed find the nine step plotting via Emily J. Griffin's blog a heart on a wire. I am a fan of her reoccurring "open letter" posts. Good luck with all those applications!
I'd like to take Sam's comment to the next level and have all of us blame James Joyce. Despite stories like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and films like The Wickerman (the original) really disturbing me, I think what this situation needs is a scapegoat that we can all throw rocks at. Or stuff inside a giant wooden idol on a creepy island somewhere off of mainland England which we will then ritualistically torch while wearing animal masks and flowers in our hair. (I told you: creepy.)
And I am way freakin jealous that Margosita's MFA program offers workshop in the long form Every. Damn. Semester.
My program offers a novel workshop once every summer.
It's in Prague.
I got accepted into a program a few thousand miles away and I chose this program because it was a hundred miles from home. If I fly over an ocean I want to do things other than sit in a room and write.
Some of the things Margosita mentions about the novel workshop -- like having to write a synopsis of the novel and give it to your classmates to facilitate workshop -- sound like brilliant learning opportunities. I've read enough agent/editor blogs to know that it is the novel that makes the first sale, and the synopsis that makes every sale after that.
And I just now realized the reason that Margosita's been AWOL from her blog is because she put together a uber-spiffy dot com. So pretty. I love it.
