Richard Scrimger Lecture Notes

We talked about author Richard Scrimger today at our meeting. His website address is http://www.scrimger.ca/home.htm. If you or your child is artistic, check out his design a cover contest. I would love it if one of my kids would attempt it and have him come speak at their school. They don't even want to think about it.

What was and wasn't said today:

The first thing Richard said was, "Thou shalt not be boring."

- Inside there are truths and they are unique to you. Stories come from the dark places within us. Start with the truth, then say "what if..." and that's where the story comes from. The main character is a version of the writer.

- The more you are aware of your own story, the more integrated as a society we are. We are looking inside ourselves and our own memories to get our stories on paper.

- Inside you there is sadness, sorrow, loss, anger, fear. These are the story lines. Lots of good writing is revenge writing.

- When you are writing a story you are revealing yourself. It is like a striptease. You want to entice the reader; you want to seduce the reader. Take the clothes off one button at a time. How many surprises are there at the end of the striptease? You want to lead the readers along so they want to know how this is going to be different. Slow down. Bring out the character, something we can identify with. Have the reader connect with the character.

- There are 3 stories [I thought there were 7]: The Journey Plot, The Stranger Plot (the stranger could be cancer, a letter, news, not necessarily a person), The Lost Plot. Actually, all stories are about loss.

- Stories are all jokes. Your job is to tell the joke the right way.

- The worst thing you can do is to tell too much about the character. The more you tell, the less interesting the character would be. Examples: The character House - his cane makes the character. Tony Soprano - he's not just a mob guy; he's a mob guy in therapy.

- Kids and adults have the same emotions. Stories happen when things go wrong.

- A writer has to be a good liar, a thief (steal characters from your past or present, their names, their characteristics, change their sex), a terrible parent (you want your own children to be boring; we want something bad to happen to our fictional children).

- All stories have a secret that is hidden from some of the characters in the story. Sometimes the readers are in on the secret. It's like a time bomb we are waiting to go off. It's the secret that draws the story.

- Writing is like a striptease, but it can also be a prayer.

This was for the benefit of those who were not in attendance. You heard a lot of this said at our meeting... if you were there. Nancy, feel free to add stuff since you took more notes than I did. LOL! I have now exhausted my list of new quotes that would have lasted me a couple of weeks so consider this today's Quote of the Day.

Keep happy!