Five Best Openings in Seattle Writing Classes

Seattle writing classes discuss story openings.
Seattle writing classes discuss best story openings.

The opening is the most important part of any story or book, one of the topics I’ll be discussing in my upcoming Seattle writing class, Tell Your Story, spend as much time as necessary finding a strong lead. Rewrite the lead until it sparkles, presenting a lively, exciting opening to the story.

In my fall Seattle writing class, I’ll discuss the five best ways of opening a story or book: summary, scenic, anecdote, inventory and beginning at the end. Each of these techniques pulls the reader into the story quickly. The type of lead you use in a given story depends on your material and the audience you want to reach. Scenic leads lend themselves to active stories; summary and anecdotal leads often work best with more reflective stories. But there’s no rule about it; go with what works best!

SUMMARY LEADS

These leads allow you to get to the point of your story quickly and easily, something I discuss in my Seattle writing classes. The trick is to make them appealing as well. Writers using summary leads often employ wordplay or humor to liven them up.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once famously observed that “Hell is other people.” And he worked from home. Imagine if he had been one of the millions of us who are forced to navigate the psychic minefields of the modern corporation.”

Summary leads are quite effective, though they are just one strategy for a lead. In my fall Seattle writing class, Tell Your Story, I’ll also discuss how to use scenic leads, anecdotal leads, inventory leads, and starting as the end as strategies for getting a reader interested in your story immediately, something I teach in all my Seattle writing classes, online writing classes and travel writing classes.

Ten Top Tips for Pitching: How to Get Happily Published

Publishing has changed a lot over the years, but writers still need to pitch, something I discuss in my writing classes for The Writer's Workshop.
Publishing has changed a lot over the years, but writers still need to pitch, something I discuss in my writing classes for The Writer’s Workshop.

In my writing classes for The Writer’s Workshop, I always teach students how to pitch, including the Ten Top Tips for Pitching, the first step in getting happily published. There are so newspapers and magazines that neophyte writers often become overwhelmed. Where do they start? How should they approach publications? What’s the best home for their story? These are some of the questions I answer in my Seattle writing classestravel writing classes, and online writing classes I teach for The Writer’s Workshop. I treated the first five tips in a previous posts. I’ll include the second five of these suggestions in this post. Here’s a guide to getting happily published.

1)      CONCENTRATE YOUR EFFORTS – Select a few publications and focus on them. Subscribe to them or read them regularly to understand the magazine’s style, content, history. This is one of the things I emphasize in my writing classes.

2)      WRITE A PITCH LETTER – Your letter should reflect all of your research of a publication. It should interest the editor, provide evidence of professionalism, and convince editor you are ideal for job.  As I emphasize in my Seattle writing classes, the letter should be short, about 250 words.

3)      FOLLOW UP WITH EDITORS – Email the editor within a few weeks of sending letter and/or manuscript. Did he or she get the pitch? Will it work for the magazine? Try to get a response. Once you get a response from a publication, keep going back to the editor. If you publish one story in the magazine, it will be easier to publish more.

4)      SPECIALIZATION – At least at first, zero in on a particular field, develop an expertise that will make you valuable to magazine editors. Specialize in areas you know from your job, hobby, interest or passion. As an amateur vintner, I use that expertise when writing about wine.

5)  PAYMENT – The amount of money you’ll make from a given article is often proportional to the publication’s circulation, from $25 for a local or specialty publication to several thousand dollars or more for a feature in a national magazine.

 

 

Brine Your Turkey!

Wild Turkey and Wine Pairing from Travel Writing Classes.
Wild Turkey and Wine Pairing from Travel Writing Classes.

In my travel writing classes for The Writer’s Workshop, I emphasize telling stories about a place through highlighting the key moments, feasts or special occasions. Thanksgiving is clearly such a feast in the U.S.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the advice about cooking a Thanksgiving turkey. Everyone has a favorite recipe, which is great, but sometimes the details become overwhelming, especially if you have to pick up relatives from the airport, buy food and drink before the stores get completely jammed, and make sure you have a chance to take in that great football game.

My advice is to focus on one thing: brining your turkey. This is simple, easy, and will make a huge difference in the success of your meal, yielding a juicy, full-flavored bird. Turkey meat is relatively lean, especially the white meat, which is prone to drying out. Like you, I’ve eaten way too many dry, overcooked turkeys in my life. I don’t need to eat any more.

Brining a turkey ensures the meat will be moist, tender and flavorful. A brine is a solution of water and salt, which allows the meat to absorb moisture as well as salt, which seasons the meat from the inside out. In addition, salt breaks down some of the turkey’s muscle proteins, which makes the meat juicy and tender. I put my turkey in a bucket with cold water and salt the night before. I’m doing this shortly.

Buy a free-range turkey if possible, for maximum flavor. I buy my turkey from B&E Meats in Seattle, which consistently sells flavorful birds. Avoid brining turkeys labeled kosher, enhanced or self-basting. You can brine a frozen or partially frozen bird but you need to allow additional time.

Thanksgiving morning you can take the bird out of the brine and begin cooking. I prefer to smoke my turkey, which adds an additional flavor, and produces a juicy, succulent bird. But you can also cook your turkey in the oven. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise if you’ve never tried brining. The resulting bird will be a big improvement over ones of the past.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nick O’Connell

Best Wines for Thanksgiving

Wild Turkey and Wine Pairing from Travel Writing Classes.
Wild Turkey and Wine Pairing from Travel Writing Classes.

In my travel writing classes, I have the pleasure of visiting places that have had centuries to find perfect pairings for food and wine. We Americans are newer to this, but we keep getting better. Practice makes perfect!

It’s hard to beat champagne as a classic wine for Thanksgiving as it goes well with everything: turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, even pumpkin pie. Widely available Moët & Chandon or Veuve Clicquot Brut NV are excellent choices. They give dinner a celebratory, special occasion quality that I prize, if they cost a bit more. Thanksgiving is a day for giving thanks and celebrating our family and friends and country. Champagne is a great way to do this.

Closer to home, domestic sparkling wines offer great value. I especially enjoy the crisp, food-friendly wines from Washington’s Domaine Ste. Michelle, such as Brut or Brut Rosé from the Columbia Valley. These pair well with Thanksgiving fare. California’s Roederer Estate makes consistently dry, appealing sparkling wine. Check out the estate’s Anderson Valley Brut Sparkling Wine.

Rosé is often considered a summer patio wine, but it goes well with turkey. There are many great affordable rosés from southern France, including Campuget or Domaine Sorin. My favorite French rosé is Domaine de la Mordoree, which I had the pleasure of visiting as part of one of my travel writing classes in Provence. It’s more expensive, but has a beautiful blood-orange color and a deep, savory, satisfying flavor. In Washington, Barnard Griffin makes a lovely Rosé of Sangiovese that is delicious and affordable.

There are many red wines that make great pairings. I recommend pulling out a bottle from the cellar, or the closet, or the store room, wherever you keep that special bottle from an occasion some years ago. Uncork it on Thanksgiving. You never know how long wine will last and it’s a great sorrow to open a bottle that’s past its prime. Bottles like this will memorialize the occasion. I have many bottles like this, gathered from my travel writing classes in Europe. I plan to open at least one this Thursday.

Let me know if this has been helpful or if you have other suggestions.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nick O’Connell

Here are some additional suggestions from Eric Asimov:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/dining/drinks/review-thanksgiving-wines.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_ck_20171103&nl=cooking&nlid=77347986&_r=0

Dramatic Scene in Seattle Writing Classes

Big Ben London and Seattle writing classes.
Big Ben London: Dramatic scenes and Seattle writing classes.

Dramatic scene is an especially effective way of organizing stories, one of the techniques I teach in my Seattle writing classes. In my Seattle writing classes, I explain how to use dramatic scenes to give life and movement to stories, whether fiction on nonfiction. It’s a technique that also helps you as a writer organize the story. You don’t need to go into detail about everything, but rather just the key moments that made the trip memorable.

On a recent trip to England, I used dramatic scene to highlight some of the adventures of the trip. Although travel stories tend to highlight the pleasures of a trip, I also like to write about the challenges and inconveniences. One of the biggest challenges was driving on the LEFT side of the road, with a clutch in my left hand. The whole operation was widely counter intuitive, with lots of honking drivers, speeding motorcyclists and phone-distracted pedestrians thrown into the mix.

As I tell students in my Seattle writing classes, it’s a good idea to always take a notebook with you to record your adventures. I took a reporter’s notebook and filled it with impressions of the trip, especially those involving driving. The hardest part was rewiring my brain to go left, not right, at key moments. This wasn’t so hard on a straightaway, but devilishly difficult on a roundabout. I followed the car in front of me, said a prayer, and plunged through it, occasionally earning a honk or other gesture.

It was a great pleasure to return the rental car to Heathrow airport and have someone else drive into London. Once there, we took the Tube and buses around, very convenient, but not the great material I found through driving on the wrong side of the road.

For more on writing with dramatic scenes, please sign up for my winter Seattle Writing class, The Arc of the Story.

Story Openings in Seattle Writing Class

Seattle writing classes discuss story openings.
Seattle writing classes discuss best story openings.

The story opening is the most important part of any story or book, one of the topics I’ll be discussing in my upcoming Seattle writing class, Revising Your Life. If your lead is not interesting, intriguing or entertaining, the reader may never get any further. Therefore, you want to spend as much time as necessary finding a strong lead. Rewrite the lead until it sparkles, presenting a lively, exciting opening to the story.

In my fall Seattle writing class, I’ll discuss the five best ways of opening a story or book: summary, scenic, anecdote, inventory and beginning at the end. Each of these techniques pulls the reader into the story quickly. The type of lead you use in a given story depends on your material and the audience you want to reach. Scenic leads lend themselves to active stories; summary and anecdotal leads often work best with more reflective stories. But there’s no rule about it; go with what works best!

SUMMARY LEADS

These leads allow you to get to the point of your story quickly and easily. The trick is to make them appealing as well. Writers using summary leads often employ wordplay or humor to liven them up.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once famously observed that “Hell is other people.” And he worked from home. Imagine if he had been one of the millions of us who are forced to navigate the psychic minefields of the modern corporation.”

Summary leads are quite effective, though they are just one strategy for a lead. In my fall Seattle writing class, Revising Your Life, I’ll also discuss how to use scenic leads, anecdotal leads, inventory leads, and starting as the end as strategies for getting a reader interested in your story immediately.

Seattle Writing Class Teaches Power of Details

Seattle Writing Class teaches how to use concrete detail as exemplified by All the Light We Cannot See.
Seattle Writing Class teaches how to use concrete detail as exemplified by All the Light We Cannot See.

In my fall Seattle writing class, Revising Your Life, I emphasize how using concrete detail can conjure a world and bring it to life. I just finished a novel which provides a masterful example of how to do this. Anthony Doerr’s, All the Light We Cannot See, brings to life the hardship and atmosphere of WWII Europe, telling the story of Marie Laure, a blind French Girl, and Werner, a German orphan, whose lives illuminate the larger story of the period.

Though I have read many books about WWII, none of them brings to life the hardships of the period as clearly as this one. Werner escapes the orphanage by learning to build and fix radios, a skill highly prized by the Nazis, who soon send him to an elite military academy to train and become indoctrinated into the Nazi world view. His younger sister, Jutta, objects to his attending the school as she believes it will turn him into one of them. The difficult moral problems each of these characters is forced to confront testifies to the subtlety and sympathy of Doerr as a writer. There are no easy answers to such questions.

Frederick, one of Werner’s friends at the academy, refuses to cooperate with commandant. The other boys then set on him, beating him nearly to death. There is no easy way out of Werner’s dilemma. He keeps his head down and mouth shut and succeeds at the school because of his prowess at fixing radios. This talent soon leads him into the German army where he specializes in tracking radios used by the enemy.

The book alternates between Werner’s and Marie Laure’s point of view. While Doerr employs a more conventional point of view with Werner, he uses a braille-like approach with Marie Laure. There is so much amazingly tactile writing in the book, first about Paris where she grows up, and then about St. Malo, a luminous city on the north coast of France, where the book’s climax takes place. I won’t give away the ending, but it is satisfying, haunting, and surprisingly optimistic, making it a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

My fall Seattle Writing Class, Revising Your Life, will emphasize how to use concrete detail in your own work. There’s still room. Let me know if you’d like to sign up!

Hemingway’s Influence on Seattle Writing Courses

Hemingway biography informs Seattle Writing  Courses.
Hemingway biography informs Seattle Writing Courses.

In my Seattle writing courses, I emphasize how studying great writing is an essential part of learning to write. There are many outstanding writers, but Ernest Hemingway serves as an important inspiration for many writers, including myself. There is much to learn from Hemingway: his precision with language, saying the most complicated things in pithy, surprising way; his hypnotic prose rhythms, some of which he borrowed from Gertrude Stein; his utterly unflinching portraits of people, not all of which were particularly flattering but many of which get burned into your memory, for example, the old man and waiters in the story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

His colorful life played a larger role in his writing. For this reason, I picked up Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker. It was published in 1969 and gives an encyclopedic account of his life. Sometimes there’s too much detail about his life, but then you can just skip a few pages. Hemingway comes across as a very complex personality, an extremely ambitious young many, driven to excel in whatever he tried, desiring admiration, displaying strength, endurance, hating politicians, intellectuals, and lap dogs. He was both shy and an incredibly braggart. He could be a warm and generous friend but could turn on friends quickly. He was a perpetual student, reading widely, studying nature, becoming an expert on topics like bull fighting, trout fishing and big game hunting.

In my Seattle writing courses, I emphasize the need to show or demonstrate in your writing rather than simply summarizing. Hemingway was a genius at this, working hard to get the details right and true so that a reader could conjure the whole picture in his or her mind. The Baker biography provides much lavish detail about Hemingway’s life. It’s not as luminescent as his own work, but does provide an important background to it.

Hemingway and Travel Writing Classes

Hotel Florida and Travel Writing Classes.
Hotel Florida inspires travel stories, travel writing classes.

In my travel writing classes, I like to emphasize how using scenes and concrete detail can make a place come to life as Ernest Hemingway did in A Moveable Feast and other works. I recently returned from teaching the Travel, Food and Wine Writing class in Spain and while there, took a tour of Hemingway’s Madrid which provided a fascinating look at his time there. The visit inspired me to read, Hotel Florida, by Amanda Vaill, a fascinating account of the intertwined lives of Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and others who went to Spain to capture the stories and images of this horrific conflict which served as a precursor to World War II.

The book begins in 1936 with a scene of Franco boarding a plane in the Canary Islands for Spanish Morocco to lead his troups onto the mainland of Spain in a carefully planned military coup against the democratically elected Socialist Government. So began the Spanish Civil war, a conflict that tore apart the country and helped touch off a global conflict. There have been many books and histories about the war, but Vaill breaks new ground in using six true to life characters–Hemingway and others–to tell her story. This gives the book a freshness that’s appealing. Hemingway found in the conflict a way to boost his writing career as his experience as a war correspondent helped provide the material of For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel that confirmed and expanded his reputation. He also fell in love with Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious and extremely attractive young journalist who became his third wife. The book chronicles their blossoming romance amid the bombs, shells, atrocities, and excitement of this important conflict, illuminating the lives of Hemingway and others who told the story of the war.

 

Writing Class Helps Bring People to Life on Page

Characterization in Writing Classes.
Ed Viesturs and Characterization in Writing Classes.

In my writing classes, I emphasize the need to bring people to life on the page. I recently interviewed mountaineer Ed Veisturs for a magazine story and sought to bring him to life through a focus on his efforts to climb Mt. Everest. Writing a short profile is a great way to do this, one of the techniques I discuss in my Seattle writing classes, including my summer writing class, Writing for Story. When writing profiles, I like to focus on a specific event that illustrates the person’s character. Here are some excerpt from that story.

What was the weather like you when you summited Everest without oxygen?

The weather was perfect that day. It was cold but nothing I couldn’t deal with. I started out using headlamp in the dark and then it gradually got bright. It was my third attempt, and previously I had been 300 feet from the summit. For me the motivation was the mystery of the last 300 feet. At 29,000 feet, 300 feet is huge. That was the barrier I wanted to discover. I was breathing 15 times for every step take. After 15, I had to take another step. You have to do it. It’s step by step, towards a rock 100 yards ahead. That was my next goal. Then I found a another goal. You have to be focused and deliberate. If you look too far into the distance, you can’t do it.

I got to the top around 1 p.m. It was 12 hours from high camp,.

How did it feel to stand on the summit?

It was one of those dream come true moments. Growing up in Illinois, one of flattest states, I had a dream of climbing an 8000 meter peak without oxygen. I had a poster of Jim Whitaker in my room. He was the expedition leader on that climb. So I lived that dream. I achieved the goal of doing it without oxygen. I was alone on the summit. To have that place  to yourself was pretty special.

 

I discuss more about characterization in my summer writing class, Writing for Story.