May 8 Technique: Revisions. We’ve touched on this in a variety of ways at various times, but we want to each come with some thoughts on how we approach the issue. I expect we all go at it a bit differently from one another, and a group discussion might give us all some new ideas. I’m certainly very interested to hear how others do it, in the hopes of improving my own approach

May 22 Topic:  “That Sounds Fishy”. I have no idea yet what I’m going to do with that, and you probably don’t know how you’ll approach it, either. Should be interesting.

June 5 Technique: “What Makes a Story?” This will be mostly a group discussion on what differentiates mere words and/or descriptions from something we see as a coherent story — regardless of its length. Gar talks about this in his courses and we can expand on that amongst ourselves as well.

June 19 Topic: “Dialogue.”  The idea here is to write a story using only dialogue, with no adverbs or other descriptors. We can differentiate between (or among) the speakers by using their names, but not add to the story ourselves. If memory serves, we were going to try to put together a story for the meeting, either starting fresh or using some materials Fred and Milo will bring us on the fifth as a guide.

July 10 (We’ll skip July 3)  Technique: “Endings”.  This to be an open discussion of how to get out of our story. We’ll start with a short presentation by each of us on how we managed a particular piece. The ending itself is not important here; we’re looking for the thought process that led up to the use of the ending we chose for our piece.

July 24 Topic: “Story Practice”.  In this exercise, we will each be given the same first and last paragraphs of a story, and we will b e required to fill in the story between them. This was done at some time as an exercise in a writing contest in which the participants had to write something like 23 paragraphs. We won’t need to make anything that long, necessarily, but just fill in the gap. The opening and ending paragraphs will be provided on July 10 from some materials Fred has in his seemingly endless library of this sort of stuff!

August 8 Technique: “Publishing Opportunities”.  There are actually several ways for a beginner to get published, and some do not even require money out front in order to get your piece read. Before the meeting, we will each need to research at least one way to do it and be prepared to talk a bit about its cost, accessibility, application to our stage of writing/publishing, etc. The meeting is to be an open discussion of what we’ve learned and a sharing of our research findings.