Workshop Notes

Various ideas for your book:

Include a scene at a rheumy palace—

Maybe adapt a scene from a nonfiction setting on shipwrecked cay.

Maybe not.

Use these words liberally:
ablation; asperity; cassocks; chasubles; hooded cowls; astringent; incursive; afflux; minikin; Grand Guignol; rutilant; cadge; rebus; limpid; enmity; hackles; pathoformic; sabbat; afflatus.

Format: one-hundred / 100-word chapters.

End abruptly, midway through the narrative, and append a long footnote that elucidates nothing.

Add Autocorrected Texts and Overheard Conversational Automatism.

Include two single word chapters: “Isotope” and “Gunplay” on pages 33 and 66, respectively.

Include the anecdote about the Girl Scout merit badge you were awarded for Sailing.

Title the work:
Lime Automatic See-Thru Cats Aging in the He Code Other Using Nixon No-Stow Straws

Include the anecdote about Harry and Jerry not having cottage cheese on their plates at your Sweet Sixteen BBQ—and how Stone took the big wooden spatula and rammed it into Orpheus.

Remember people are usually pessimistic about rain.

Include the scene where you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every potential boyfriend on the first date.

Include the line: “I’m not a hipster.”

Don’t disappoint anyone.

No one was mad at you!

Remember what Dr. Greene said:
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

Include the words THE END.

“The end of this story should give us hope, but it doesn’t give us hope.”

— Alejandro Zambra / Bonsai