Plot

Aug. 23, 2014

Time: 9pm to noon

Location: Village Writing School

Winston Churchill said that History (life?) is just one damn thing after another. E.M. Forster said that “the king died and the queen died” is a story, while “the king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. So how do we take a simple series of events (one damn thing after another) and turn them into a plot? More importantly, a plot that other people will want to read? This workshop will explore the characteristics of a good plot, examine several effective plot structures, and experiment with some ways to generate those structures. And then we will generate a plot or two.

Gary Guinn, Ph.D. is retired from teaching writing and literature at John Brown University. His novel, A Late Flooding Thaw, was published by Moon Lake Publishing in 2005. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a variety of magazines, including The Midwest Poetry Review, Carve, in which his story was a finalist for the Raymond Carver Prize, The Bryant Literary Review, The Rockford Review, Elder Mountain: a Journal of Ozark Studies, and The Arkansas Literary Review. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies Yonder Mountain, from the University of Arkansas Press, and Puzzles of Faith and Patterns of Doubt, from Editions Bibliotekos. He lives in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, with his wife, Mary Ann, and his lab mix, Seamus, and his Corgi mix, Peanut.