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University of North Florida 2010 Writers Conference

I wrote this article about my experience as a participant in the UNF 2010 Writers Conference during which time one of my short stories was picked for a three panel critique session. I read the first page of the story before the panel critique began. Needless to say, it was a great experience. I was so nervous! But it comes with the territory.

The first thing I can remember about my childhood was my enjoyment of keeping a journal. I wrote in Farsi then, before we moved to the United States in the summer of 1983. I loved the poetics of my native language, but more importantly, I loved discovering that imagination fed into language and language fed into imagination.

As I imagined a bird fly over a canopy, I also saw the lush greenery surrounding it or the desolate desert that reached to a chain of mountains across the horizon emanating a power altogether of their own.

The pages of my journals became an instrument of Space and Time in which I became the traveler who conversed with everything big and small–a subtle dialogue with myself, with nature and the universe. That impulse that began at childhood killed a lot of trees and sent several hard-drives to wherever old computers go. And ever since, I have lost several dozen stories, journals, rants and reflections.

“I just deleted eighty-percent of my writing,” I told an artist friend on the phone one afternoon back in June of 2009.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Because it was all terrible—had to get rid of them,” I said.

“What if they were gold?” my friend asked, speaking while painting an Indiana Jones mural for a ten-year old boy’s bedroom in Orange Park, Florida.

“No, I am sure they were all bad,” I said.

So during the UNF 2010 Writer’s Conference, I went in with a burning question I believed could be best answered by a professional and well-established author. WHY WRITE? I waited and waited patiently for Steve Berry to open the floor for questions after his “What Every Writer Should Never Forget,” workshop. I was thinking that Mr. Berry would surely find my question odd or ridiculous, but instead, without blinking an eye or even pausing for a millisecond, he answered, “Because you have that little voice inside of you.”

“Really? That’s it? But don’t other people have that voice?” I asked the young woman sitting next to me seeking further assurance.

“No,” she said, smiling and shaking her head, “other people don’t have that voice.”

After nearly twenty years of feeling overwhelmed and almost embarrassed about this little voice that narrated inside me, I felt an immense sense of freedom and affirmation. No, I didn’t have to be scared of that voice. No, I didn’t have to shut it off by destroying work–I could use it to write. Enter Sandra McDonald, the author of three science fiction novels, “The Outback Stars,” “The Stars Down Under” and “The Star Blue Yonder.”

As we, a group of ten aspiring writers, sat in a large circle, in Sandra’s general fiction critique workshop, she asked us to give our names an adjective that started with the first letter of our first name; so we got, Motivated Michael, Determined Dean, Shocking Sherry, Pensive Paul, Creative Carolyn and so on.  It was a great start–it made us laugh and feel at ease. Then Sandra asked who wanted to go first. I raised my hand eager to hear what readers thought of my first ten-page submission. I had never had a whole group of writers read my work before. In fact, I have never had anybody read my work before for the purpose of critique.

“Let’s start with Pensive Paul,” Sandra said, “We will do yours after lunch.”

Now, I have to wait several more hours.

“Before we start, take a piece of paper and write down two things someone would do instead of reading your book,” Sandra said.

Interesting question. Never thought of that before.

I wrote: Grocery shopping and cooking. Others wrote several other activities such as hiking, swimming, fishing, sky-diving and spending time with their children.

“So remember when you are creating a protagonist, that character has to grab the reader from your first sentence and take her through the entire book because otherwise there’s so much else someone can be doing instead of reading your book,” Sandra said with her clear and precise words.

Awesome! Got it.

“What is the job of your protagonist?” Sandra asked.

“To tell a story?” I wrote on my notebook.

“The job of your protagonist is to Pro-Tag, to do something: chase the bad guy like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, or find his son in Finding Nemo or let go of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones.”

Cool.

“Now, in Finding Nemo, what does the Dad want and what does he need?” Sandra asked.

“To get his son back?”  I said.

“What’s his internal need?” Sandra asked again.

Silence.

“To get over his fear of the ocean,” Sandra said.

Herein lies a compelling character and an interesting plot, I wrote in my notebook.

“When the internal need of the character is fulfilled after surmounting conflicts and his external want is achieved, that is called a happy ending.”

This is great. Finally, someone is telling me the BIG SECRET of writing well. Thank goodness and thanks, Sandra.

After lunch, I walked back in the conference room and saw that Sandra had drawn a line between two words — genre and literary.

I knew immediately why she had done that. I had submitted a literary piece. She was setting the critique for my work.

“Genre is about the story. Literature is about language,” Sandra said. “Some authors are perfectly happy with a small group of readership,” she said, drawing a small circle inside a big circle with the word “ocean.”

Yes, small group of readers. That’s fine with me.

After Sandra explained the difference between genre and literary and their respective markets, she opened the floor for my work to be critiqued.

“Now that I know this work falls under literary, I can understand it better,” Pensive Paul said.

So there I was on the other extreme, aiming for literature. Well, that’s not an accident. I love language and I still read the classics. I was relieved to see that it was okay to want that. There was nothing aberrant about not being a genre writer.

But then I learned something entirely fabulous. I can be somewhere in the middle. I can keep my love of language, but meet the genre reader halfway in the middle, combining genre and literature into good storytelling.

“Don’t ever lose your poetic voice,” Sandra said, looking at me, “but your story needs structure, your character needs to be compelling, your dialogue needs to be natural.”

Awesome, I can do all that. I just didn’t know how to do it before because no one had made it as clear.

Now I know, thanks to the UNF Writers Conference and Sandra McDonald, who brought me to Aristotle’s Golden Mean, a happy place between storytelling and language.

Since I have destroyed my first ten million words as Mr. Berry suggested in the beginning of the conference, now I am going to take a gentle walk through the maze of my work and build those unique and careful pathways for my readers so that they can walk safely through the pages of my stories.

How great is that? Priceless.