 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Angela Scott, and I am the library assistant here at the Billy Jean King Main Library's Miller Special Collections room. On behalf of our senior librarian of collection services Jade Wheeler, our special collections librarian Jeff Whalen, and all the staff here at the Long Beach Public Library. I'd like to welcome you to the Miller rooms poetry and fiction writing workshop series. Today we are pleased to present a dynamic program with special guests and local author Stephen Deeble. This is one of a series of poetry and fiction writing workshops that will be presented periodically in the Miller room throughout the year. In addition to our local history lecture series, our art of nature lecture series, our musical performance programs Miller room book club short story reading club and much more. Please keep an eye on our Long Beach Public Library calendar and website for upcoming events, and we hope you'll join us again for more of these special programs as they become available. Now while we have you all here we'd also like to mention our next online program for the Miller room on Saturday November 21 from 230 to 4pm. Please join us for our next Miller room book club meeting on the 1964 classic memoir, a movable feast by Ernest Hemingway. This memoir details Hemingway's life and experiences in 1920s Paris, where he lived as a fledgling writer with his first wife, as well as his interactions with other famous expat writers, artists and intellectuals, also living and working in Paris during this time. Now our Miller room book club is open again to the public for signups and participation. So this is a great opportunity for adults to get involved, whether you're brand new to book clubs and want to try something new, or if you've participated in book clubs before. We enjoy lively informal discussions on a rotating selection of fiction and nonfiction books and short stories relating in some way to the Miller rooms collections and areas of study. On the arts, performing arts, Asian heritage and culture, libraries and special collections, as well as about our other local Long Beach to Southern California area histories. Expanding out to larger topics that also connect Long Beach with California and US history in general. No experience is necessary and all levels of participation are welcome. Now this book club is currently meeting online via zoom and it's limited to a maximum of 10 to 12 people per meeting. So pre registration and RSVPs are necessary. For more information or to join the Miller room book clubs email list, please visit our LBPL website and the calendar events for the Miller room are accessible via the library's homepage. You can also call the main library for more information or message me in the live chat after our program ends today, or we can video chat after the program. The Miller room will also have a variety of other programs rolling out in the next few months so please keep an eye on our website and calendar for more details. Now, getting back to our program for today. It is our pleasure to once again welcome and introduce our featured speaker this afternoon, Steven Diebel. Steven is an award winning writer filmmaker and multimedia artists and is a native of Long Beach. Steven began writing an earnest in the sixth grade, grinding out screenplays and short stories on a cast iron underwood typewriter that he likes to say outweighed him by 80 pounds. In college he worked on the student newspaper for fun. He won awards for his critical review of films as well as his photography. His first professional writing appeared in the Los Angeles Times. He studied film journalism and electronics in college parlaying this into a career and technical writing. He wrote produced and directed three short films based on original screenplays. He's written a variety of short stories and novels which he may be telling a spell later, and he's the author and curator and host of riveted the storytelling series of Eleanor in downtown Long Beach, and he leads numerous workshops and classes for the Long Beach Public Library. In today's program, Steven will present on what constitutes a short story, including flash fiction. You'll be working on drafting very short pieces to share with Steven, and you'll receive helpful tips for marketing stories to publishers and agents. At the end of today's program, please stay for Q&A that will be moderating through our chat. If you have any questions, please type them into the chat bar and you'll see a chat button at the bottom of your screen, and you can type and submit your questions there. And Steven and I will moderate those questions at the end. The program will officially end at 4pm if you need to leave, but you're welcome to stay and continue asking questions via chat until about 4.15. We'll also be sending out an email soon with a link to the archive video recording of this program so you can watch it later at your leisure. Finally, we are recording this program today, so if any of the participants do not want their faces recorded during this live program, please click the stop video button at the bottom of your screen to disable your video. You'll still be able to see the presentation, but we won't be able to see you. So, thank you very much for joining us again today. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Miller Room is pleased to present our very special guest, Steven Diebel. Okay, so what we're going to cover today is, first of all, I wanted to take just just a couple of minutes and have each of you introduce yourselves. It's important to me to know who you are and where you're coming from. What is it that you are looking for? Then we're going to talk about different aspects of short stories. We're going to talk about writing them. And that is going to include looking at a couple of pretty famous writers. In fact, Angela was just talking about Ernest Hemingway and he's one of the two. And we'll talk about these two guys, their writing. And I wanted to say, first of all, like before we go any further. A few years ago, I made a realization about myself as not just a writer but a reader and I think it's really important for writers to read. I was looking at what I was reading and I kind of realized that while I had actually made a deliberate effort to start reading multi-culturally, one of the things that I wasn't doing was reading works by women. And so I made it a point to start reading works by women as well as authors from other cultures. In preparing this presentation, I realized there could have been a lot more authors included. One of the things we're going to talk about actually would have been making it very appropriate to discuss magical realism. However, I really focused on two writers who I am much more familiar with. I've read Borges and Marquez, but the two writers we're going to do the case studies on are writers I've actually studied to a degree. So we'll look at them, look at their writing, and then we're going to do a couple of writing prompts. So I'm going to have you do for five minutes just because this is all about short, we're just going to take five minutes and have you write a sentence based on what we've been talking about. Then we're going to follow that by talking about rewriting and editing. We've got another exercise we'll do there. And then I'm going to do a section to close the program on marketing to agents and publishers. That is something I think a lot of writers, that's not part of your training as a writer. The marketing is a whole other hat for your head. So I want to spend a little time talking to you about what I've learned in my experiences with that. And then we'll have some closing remarks and as Angela mentioned, we're going to do some Q&A. So I want to make sure that we get everybody's questions answered. If we run out of time, I'm going to be providing you with my contact information so you can follow up with me if you'd like. So let's do the introductions. What I'd like to do is find out who you are, tell us the name of your favorite writer, and if you have a favorite story, what short story that would be. And then if you feel up to it, give us the opening sentence of the story of your life. Can we provide the sound and video? Sure. Am I going to see them or do I need to stop sharing? You'll see everyone. Okay, great. Okay, so we're enabling everyone to turn on your video now if you want to do that and your audio. Are you seeing them? Yes, we're seeing folks. Can you see everybody? I am not seeing anything but my slide presentation. I don't want to stop sharing. No, no, you can just put it in gallery view if you want. Okay, I don't remember how to do that. Right. Stephen, you can just select side by side mode. I'm not even sure how to do that. Let's just go forward. Why don't you call on the first person and we can have them introduce themselves. Okay, Erica, if you want to start. Morning Erica for afternoon. Yes, my name is Erica lands down and I'm just going to go back in the day when we were. When we were able to be together, I was actually the facilitator of the writer's workshop, the Los Altos writers workshop, because I'm a supervising library at the Los Altos branch. Yeah, and it was a fabulous workshop. I really miss it. So that that's gone to the, by the sidelines at this point. My favorite writer I would say is probably Michael Shaban. Marilyn Robinson, though, is she's, she's moving in quick. Yeah. To take a side by side. Yeah. Especially that last book, Jack kind of blew my mind. Opening sentence to the story of my life. Okay, let's see. It's, it's dark behind me, but if you could see, I'm actually up at my cabin. So I would say. The day, the day, the realtor put the key to the cabin in the palm of her hand. She knew was the beginning of the rest of her life. Oh, that's great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that too. So you guys can see it. Thank you. And welcome. Sure. Thank you. All right. Who's next. Okay. So we have Michael. You'd like to go forward and good afternoon, Michael. Oh, good afternoon, Stephen. Is my audio okay. Yes, you're fine. Okay. Okay. My name is Michael. My favorite writer is probably a toss up between Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney. I'm a writer. I'm a writer. I'm a writer. Although there are several. One B's, or I guess one C's through. Double Z. In that list. The opening sense to the story of my life. Wow. You can, you can pass if you feel like it. I would just say. One day he realized that. There are many ways to do anything. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce myself. Thank you. You're welcome, Michael. Thank you. All right. Next. All right. So we have Hoff Brooks. If you want to go ahead and. Introduce yourself. Hi. Yeah. Sorry. My camera was working originally. I turned off and we'll come back on. I'm Hoff Brooks. I'm. I'm Joe. Okay. I'm. Sorry. I'm sorry. I really like that. I think is what's seen X for a. Little Prince and then stars. Right. Love both. I don't really have enough. Since the story of my life. Okay. On that one. Okay. That's fine. It's a bit of a whimsical idea. it. Thank you so much, Brooks. Is it Brooks Hoff? Hoff. Okay. Well, thank you and welcome, sir. Thank you. And next. Okay. So we have Sophia next. I don't know if her audio is working right now, but her video is not. She has an unstable connection, but Sophia, go ahead and chat if you'd like to. Okay. Thank you, Angela. Hi. My name is Steven and everyone. My name is Sophia. I'm a mother of three young children. And my favorite writer is Brad Mauser. I like his book because most of the book is about the real story of the like famous people like Abraham Lincoln and many more. And I like to read those books from my kid, my young kid. Okay. And actually I'm not a writer. I moved to United States almost three years. And I saw this even on the Facebook of the public, Long Beach Public Library. And I'm interested to attend because I want to learn more about how to write a story. Okay. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you and welcome. Who's next. All right. We just have one more person, and I'm not sure if she's going to be able to join by audio, but here she goes. Hi, everyone. My name is Emmy. I'm a writer more by hobby than by trade or profession. I'm currently enrolled in the Long Beach City College short class. I figured it would be a great opportunity to hear from somebody who's in the business and, you know, just talk shop and get my learn on. As far as my favorite author or favorite writer, that was a hard one. I had a lot of ideas bouncing around my head, but I guess ultimately I'll go with David Sideris because just his humor and his wit have been very powerful for me, over the years. And so I'll go with that. And as far as the opening sentence to the story of my life, I'll have to get back to you on that one. Okay. That's fair. But yeah, I'm really excited for the workshop and hope to learn a lot. So. Well, good deal. Welcome. I actually got to see David Sideris last year. At Royce Hall. That was pretty great. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you all for introducing yourselves. I'd like to welcome you all and now it's my turn to tell you a little bit about my experience with short stories. So when I was very young, I got a hold of a copy of, I think it was an Alfred Hitchcock anthology. And of course, you know, they, they were looking for public domain stuff and they published what was at the time, the first Sherlock Holmes story that I ever read, which was the adventure of the red headed league. And I, I, I felt that was it. I just became, I became a reader. Right then. I read voraciously, although not necessarily the best. Writing. I was really more reading popular stuff. In college. I took a literature course at city Long Beach City College. And we were exposed to some. Pretty great short stories through that. Over the years I have been reading short stories by a variety of different writers. And I came to find the Jack London story to build a fire. Is my favorite story. That story is about a man and a dog. Going across the Yukon territory in the snow. And it, what happens to that guy is, is amazing. And the way that London describes it, it really, he, he lived up there. He had the experience firsthand with that weather and those, those, you know, that, that landscape. He knew it. And it was evident by, by the way he described it to build a fire. It really tells not just a story about this guy, but the whole idea behind it is that, that he thought he, he was. He thought he was better than nature. That he could survive anything. And he was wrong. So I started to mention earlier, you know, the, the idea of, of this course, this, this presentation. And my experience with this, this presentation. And my experience with short stories in general, I've read short stories by a lot of different writers. And as I began to prepare for this. I realized looking at those stories that they had all been written by people who most of whom were no longer alive. Most of whom I'm going to just say we're white men. And so I decided that I needed to catch up on what's been going on in short story writing. So I began checking books out of the library. That were anthologies each year, you know, they published the best short stories of 2015 best short stories of 29. So I started checking those out of the library. And the goal was to read stories by people I had not read before. So that was what my focus was. And after I'd gone through a few of those volumes. I happened to know a lot of people who write and read. And I just put the word out. I said, tell me your favorite short story. And I will read it. And I did. I got a lot of great suggestions from people. And it broadened my experience with short stories dramatically. I was reading short stories by authors from different cultures, men, women. And it was a pretty good broad base. Now, as I said, when we got to this course, I wanted to do a couple of case studies and. Those case studies represent my background, which is the white men. We could have brought in others. But these two guys, you will find. Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. They're pretty well known. They're, they're, their writing styles are amazing. And we're going to look at them specific examples in their work to look at them. And hopefully learn a few things. So let's go get started on the writing. When Angela and I started talking about a workshop, we, we both love short stories. You know, but what, what, what are we going to talk about? When you're talking about short stories, you have some of the same considerations that you have with other forms of writing. You have issues of story driven versus character driven. You have character arcs. You have plot arcs. We want to, we asked ourselves, well, what makes short stories unique? And what makes short stories unique is. Revity. They're short. Right? Big surprise. But what, what does this mean to us? Of course. When you're talking about short stories, you have some of the same considerations that you have with short stories. Of course. We all know. Brevity is the soul of wit. Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare. And if you are familiar with this quote, it was actually said ironically in the play Hamlet. Because the guy that it is said about is something of a wind bag. The idea of a short story is you're conveying a lot of information quickly. And to do that, we came up with a couple of different ideas. Short stories traditionally are five to 10,000 words. Depending on the source that you go to. That can vary somewhat. And by comparison, you have these other forms, the novelette, the novella and a novel. And the various lengths. So you can see you're talking about, you have at least a quarter of the size of a novel in order to be able to convey your ideas in a short story. Then we come up with this new thing. That's not really new. Flash fiction has actually been around a long time, as we'll see. But flash fiction is much shorter than short stories. And it's, there are a variety of types of flash fiction. And the types are based on word count. Usually there are a thousand words or less. There are specific forms that are much shorter. And we're going to talk about these more in detail later. Now the premise that I came up with for this. And this is why I was mentioning magical realism. And I'm going to talk about these more in detail later. Now the premise that I came up with for this. And this is why I was mentioning magical realism. A minute ago. Was it, there are two different approaches to writing that I have experienced with that. I believe can provide some tools for us to be able to use to write. Shorter. To convey more information. One of those is journalism. I happened to be trained in journalism. I started working on the newspaper. I was a writer at. Long Beach City college when I was in junior college. And the training I got there was very valuable. I'd already been writing for a long time, but the, they taught me some things that really helped me become a better writer. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But the basic idea behind journalistic writing is that you're describing reality succinctly. And we'll talk about how they do that. And then we'll talk about how they do that. And poetry on the other hand is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum poetry. You're not really. You're not describing reality directly. Poetry gives us the opportunity to convey reality using impressions rather than descriptions. And it's interesting to note that if you've ever studied journalism, and I don't know if some of you may have. In journalism, there are a number of techniques in your journalistic writing, your editor will brand it purple pros. And you will see when we talk about poetry, purple pros is actually one of those tools that we have available to us. In the form of alliteration. Journalism asks these questions. And the answers. We just state as facts. And this is what it is. We want to know who did the thing. We want to know what, what was done. We want to know where, where did it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen? How did it happen? Now. What order of these questions are answered in is going to vary, depending on what it is we're talking about. So. We organize these in terms of our writing. Using a structure called the inverted pyramid. And the inverted pyramid shows us how we're going to convey the information in our story. The top of the inverted pyramid is the lead, which is the first sentence in your story. So for a journalist, they're going to take and break down the information about this event, whatever it is that they're writing about with who, what, where, when, why, and how. It's as simple as that. If you've ever written a press release. And this is something that we're going to get to, you know, as, as the marketing and publicity part at the end there. Press releases follow the same structure. You're going to tell them as succinctly as possible. What's going on? Who's involved? When is it happening? Where is it happening? And, you know, why do you want to be involved in it? Why do you want to do it? When you're writing the story, you would go into the body following the lead and add the crucial information that expands the topic. So you start with just the facts, and then you begin to flesh it out. And then, you know, further on the tail of the story would be any extra information and related items. That is in a nutshell, journalistic writing. So at this point, I'd like to take a few minutes. I'm going to give you five minutes and I'm going to give you a writing prompt. What I'd like you to do is use five minutes to write a single sentence. And that sentence is going to be based on this writing prompt, but I'm going to show you here. Angela. Okay. I'm going to hit the button to go to the next slide. Do you want to give us a five minute count? Okay. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to show you here. Actually, I cannot share it. Okay. So you're going to, I'm going to have to click off of your screen here to share on my end unless you want to click. Oh, no, no, I'm just going to go to the next slide. I just need you to count for five minutes to let us know when. Oh, absolutely. Okay. No. Okay. All right. And if anybody has any questions, feel free to send them in the chat and we will answer them. Okay. All right. So here is your first writing plant prompt. Okay. So you can type your name or her in a single sentence. Okay. You have about a minute and 30 seconds left. Thank you, Angela. 30 seconds. Okay. Time's up. Okay. Do we have anyone who would care to share the sentence that they wrote? Indicate with your, right? Raising your hand. Okay, Michael. You can go ahead and unmute yourself. Hey, Michael. Hi, Stephen. This was hard. Really? Okay. Yeah. Tell me why it was hard. First of all, I wanted to do something other than write about hair. The only thing that came to mind for me with blonde was hair. So I, it took me about four minutes and then I started typing. So I wrote. Okay. Okay. Lawrence blondes Hawking form filled the illuminated doorway as his broad heaving shoulders crusted and receded like moonlit tides. Wow. Well, you took that in a very interesting direction. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, this is interesting. This is exactly what I was going for. It is what, you know, the prompt, it's supposed to be a trigger to suggest something to you. And that's all writing prompts or four is just to just help you write something. And so that four minutes you spent thinking about it was time well spent because look what you came up with. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Would anyone else care to share their sentence? We have Emmy who's ready. If you want to unmute yourself, Emmy. Okay. Great. Thank you everyone. So. I'll just go with what I wrote. She was the embodiment of cool aviators combat boots, a flare T-shirt and a blonde pixie cut sharper than a razor. Very good. I like it. That's very, very pointed. Thank you for that. Does anyone else have one they care to share? Okay. We have Erica. I was a little confused about the it. So, but I just, I went ahead anyway. I just, and I'm glad that you say that because that's a little confusing to me too. There's a point to this, which I will make in a little while. And you'll see where I'm going, but. Okay. Go ahead, share. Okay. I wrote his curly hair was stiff with dried salt. Bleached as white as bone from the lifetime of writing waves under the glaring Huntington beach sun. I'm going to show you where I'm going with that. Oh yeah. Very good. Okay. So emphasizing the blonde. As opposed to taking it in a different direction. That's very good. Thank you. I tried to do it without using the word blonde. Cause I thought maybe that was part of it. Don't use it. Well, it's, you know, okay. So it's funny, you know, the word it is, is vague. And that I'm saying him or her because it doesn't really matter. Gender here, gender wise. Okay. Let's, let's, uh, Is anyone else care to share before we move on? If anyone else has a comment, go ahead and unmute yourself. Otherwise we'll just move on. Give you a minute. Yeah, sure. I'm not sure how you do that. Hand up. Okay. This will work. Sorry about that. No, that's fine. I'm not fully up on my zoom skills apparently. I use it every day and I'm not either. Yeah. Me too. Unfortunately. Okay. So here I wrote, uh, they're long blonde hair move gently side to side momentarily revealing a dark scar beneath the sparkling blue. Oh, nice. Very nice. Okay. Why don't we move forward then? Um, and, and if you care to share yours via chat, um, That's great. I'd love to read the sentences that you come up with. Uh, so let's move on. I'm not moving forward again. Oh, there we go. Okay. So the flip side of this is poetry. And there are different kinds of poetry. This, and this is not meant to be a workshop on poetry. I'm just presenting this as kind of an overview of, of the tools that poetry provides us. So poetry is classified in three different types. There's narrative poetry of, of which, um, we have allegories, ballads, burlesques, epics, like, uh, what is that? Uh, Famous epic. Um, Oh God, the name escapes me. Elliot and the Odyssey. Yeah. That one, that one right there. Um, and then dramatic poetry, which is actually, uh, More theater than it is poetry. If you, if you ask me, uh, monologues and soliloquies. Um, and then finally we have the category of lyrical poetry, which includes elegies, haiku, Ode's and sonnets. Sonnets are particularly interesting because of the way they are, uh, using very specific, um, rhyme schemes and rhythms. And these are elements that we're going to see, uh, rhyming, not so much, but, uh, rhythm as an element that we can use in, um, in our, uh, in our short story writing. And these are not exclusive, by the way. Uh, you can have lyrical poems that contain elements of narrative poetry, narrative poetry that has elements of dramatic poetry and so on. So it's a, you can mix and match. Poetry communicates differently than our journalistic writing in that we're not, we're not describing reality. Uh, directly. We are conveying impressions. Um, and I believe that you can get more information through an impression, uh, than a description because impressions connect with your emotions. So when you are, uh, reading something that's been written using these poetic tools, um, you, you are feeling things that you wouldn't necessarily be getting by reading just the who, what, where, when, why and how. So the poetic tools for the prose writer, um, rhythm, rhythm is really important to me because it helps the reader follow the writing. It gives you a flow and a sense of movement through the writing, uh, alliteration. Uh, well, you remember earlier we were talking about purple prose. Uh, purple prose is alliteration. We're repeating a consonant sound. Uh, and this is something that again creates rhythm, alliteration, repeated sounds create a rhythm within the writing and, and basically it helps the flow. Uh, again, repetition. Um, there are different ways of repeating and it's not just through the repeating of a consonant sound, repeating words, um, repeating phrases. Again, you're creating a rhythm within the writing. It's similar to a poem, but in the short story, you can use this as a way of moving the story forward. Similes are the figure of speech involving a comparison of one thing to another. Now, if there is one author known for the simile, it's Raymond Chandler. And we're going to see a couple of examples of, of the similes in his work, but that he, that is the thing he's most famous for. Uh, so when you say something is like something else, you're conveying information about that thing. And by making that association between those two things, you can convey a lot of information in a very, very short phrase. Uh, and metaphors metaphors are similar to similes in that you are comparing something to another thing, but in the case of a metaphor, you're not saying it's like the other thing. You're saying it is the other thing, uh, which is much more poetic. You find metaphors used less frequently in prose writing, but poets also use metaphor as a way of explaining or referring to something in a brief, but effective way. And if that doesn't sound like something that's going to help us write short stories, I don't know what will. Okay, we're going to do another writing prompt. I'm going to show you an image. The image is one you will probably not have ever seen before. Um, I'm going to give you five minutes to write another sentence. And I'm not going to say anything else. I want the image itself to suggest whatever it suggests to you. You want to write more than a sentence you're welcome to. Um, so we're going to go ahead and do five more minutes on this writing prompt. Uh, Angela, do you want to time us out? Okay, starting now. Okay. And here is the image. Okay. A minute and a half up to go. Thank you. 30 seconds. Okay. Time's up. Thank you. All right. We're going to do our sharing again. Uh, if you're willing, uh, who would like to share what they wrote about this prompt. Okay. Okay. Okay. Erica, go ahead and unmute yourself. Erica. I'm doing the, uh, I'm doing the old fashioned raising my hand. That's okay. That's fine. Yeah. As long as you're just not raising your real hand in your room there. Okay. Forgive me if I'm going to the political, but. Okay. Hey, the, nobody said, and there were no rules. The idea of the prompt is it suggests something to you. Okay. For the past four years, I'd felt like I was surviving only by sucking on a life current from God or mother earth. Upon in a worldwide chess match between good and evil. Okay. I kind of love that. That's amazing. Thank you. Um, Okay. So just so you know, this painting was painted over 40 years ago. So, uh, yeah, it wasn't right. But that's, that's really quite an interpretation. And so we're excited to be presented with this. Oh, thank you. And thank you very much for that. Uh, have we, do we have someone else there who would like to share? All right. Oh Okay. Go ahead, Michael. Oh, with someone else next time. No, no, please go ahead. Oh, okay. We'll do any next. Okay. So I kind of went beyond one sentence because it's, that's fine. Yeah. ruling in emerald celestial spaces before landing on cerebrum. He surveyed the landscape through his acrylic mask and wondered if he'd taken too many precautions. Perhaps the space suit was not needed, he thought. Nothing and everything are not what they seem, a disembodied voice warned. Leave your eyes over your mind at your peril, your move. An's eyes continue to dart around the landscape. He replied, I refuse to divide my senses in pursuit of games with unknown rules or prizes. And that's as far as I got. That's you. Well, you definitely took that a lot farther, but that's really great. That the idea of the planet cerebrum. I love that. Just bear it, there are bellows in there. Were you were you the one that said you love Octavia Butler? I did. Yeah. Okay. So I had a feeling when I showed this that you would appreciate that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Emmy. All right, Emmy, just go ahead and unmute yourself. There you go. Okay. Here's what I came up with. I wrote a brave new world opened up before her. The combinations, the combination of shapes and colors of surrealist painting. The mission was a success, she cried. The sound getting no further than her helmet. Mission control offered no response. That's great. Because one of the things that strikes me about this, the isolation in this is pretty profound. And so yeah, there would be no, no answer back. All right. Is anyone else want to share? If there's anyone else, just go ahead and unmute yourself. We'll wait a few seconds. Okay, it looks like a half. Yeah, I'll go. So I put like the familiar but forgotten taste on the tongue she floated unable to find a name for the place just beyond her visor. Wow. And that's a sentence. But look what he did with that. One sentence conveyed, I just, I think that's as perfect a description of this as I could get. So succinct. Great. Great. Thank you very much. This painting incidentally is hanging on the wall behind me. I did this about 40 years ago. And when I was trying to think of something that nobody would have seen before, it might provoke some responses. I thought, well, you know what, this, this probably will do that. So I grabbed it and used it. Okay, let's, let's go ahead and move on. This brings us to the case studies section. I wanted to talk a little bit about these two guys. Because there are similarities and differences in them. Even though I'm using them here to illustrate two different aspects of what we're talking about here. So first of all, the two writers that we're going to look at are Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler. These two guys are probably two of the most well known writers of the 20th century. A lot of people think that Chandler was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and that may very well be although Chandler would be the last person to admit that. He actually lampooned Hemingway in his novel, The Long, The Long Goodbye, by having his detective Philip Marlowe call a police detective Hemingway repeatedly and even went so far as to emulate Hemingway's writing style for that interaction. It's, it's actually kind of funny. Hemingway, I tried to find out if he had any comments on Chandler and the fact is that there was there was nothing returned in those searches. So it's unknown whether Hemingway was aware of or cared about Raymond Chandler as a writer. So let's let's talk first of all about Hemingway. Hemingway was trained in journalism, so he was very familiar with the who, what, where, when, why, and how he wrote four newspapers. That was what he did in his initial writing career. In fact, they say that his experience on the Kansas City Star and the style guide that they provided him became the source of his writing style. If you're not familiar with a style guide, any publication has a style guide that answers the questions a writer might have about how you, how you express different kinds of information. The Associated Press has a style guide. They, there are others as well. If as a, as a writer, you are not aware of Strunk and White's elements of style. I highly recommend it. It's a very small book. But it is your best friend next to your editor if you have an editor. But the I recommend for the $2 and 50 cents this book is going to cost you get get a copy and keep it near your computer. You will thank me. One of the writers by the way, it's Strunk and White. The White is E.B. White author of Charlotte's Web. Okay, so in addition, the work on the newspapers led to Hemingway covering the Spanish Civil War. So he actually went over to Spain and was what did they call it in Afghanistan? They embedded, he was embedded with the rebels in Spain, and was sending his stories back to the United States to the newspapers that were covering it. He wrote a large number of short stories over the course of his life, published six different collections. And then those were all collected into the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway, the Think of Vigilia edition, which is on the bookshelf behind me. And I've read every one of those. There is another story that's not in that book that was published, I think, two years ago. Somebody came up with a story that had previously been unknown. And that is not in there. And I actually still haven't read that story. So technically, I can't say I've read all of his stories. So that's Hemingway. Chandler was an American, he was the son of a man in the American military who was serving in England. He was raised in their public school system and educated at Delwich College. One of his classmates was PG Wodehouse, another guy who became a famous writer. One of the things that most people who are familiar with Chandler do not know is that after he graduated from Delwich College, he spent a period writing romantic poetry. And that is one of the things I think that separates him from the other writers in his genre. The detective story prior to him did not have the level of language that he brought to it. Now, in addition to the romantic poetry, his writing training might have involved business writing. He did work as an executive in the oil industry for a number of years. And business writing is a mixed bag, you know, straight business writing might tend more towards the technical, which means more brevity, right? Or less, you get it. But by the same token, sometimes business writing is about hyperbole, and that is not appropriate here. He wrote over 50 short stories that were published in Black Mask, Time Detective, and several other magazines. And then subsequently, when he started writing novels, he, his own word, he cannibalized his short stories to create his most famous novels. I have actually spent a fair amount of time studying his work, and have come up with some interesting notes. But one of the things that in addition to the writing of romantic poetry, I recently learned through a friend of mine, who has research rights at the Huntington Library archives, which houses Chandler's material, they discovered a liberato that he'd written for a musical, which had never been published. So, you know, before the detective stuff, he had done a kind of a mixed bag of writing. So but he, as I said, between the other the other guy who's the most well-known detective writer, Dashiell Hammett. And these two had very different approaches to writing. Hammett, of course, had been a detective himself, whereas Chandler basically read stories in these magazines before he wrote his own first story, but his first story sold. So I'm going to just throw out a few examples of both of their writings. And in some cases, it's just really an example of good writing. And in others, we're going to illustrate specific points. This is a quote from Farewell My Lovely, which is a novel. However, as I said, he cannibalized the short stories to create the novels. And I'm pretty sure this exact quote exists in one of his short stories that was used to create Farewell My Lovely. I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room. What I wanted to show you through this particular piece of writing is the use of repetition here. I needed, I needed, I needed, I needed. This I feel helps build the momentum of the sentence and takes you through it very quickly. And so this is one of those poetic devices that I think Chandler used in addition to similes. And we'll see some other examples of similes as well. So here's a Hemingway quote. And this is a description of one of the characters in the short happy life of Francis McComber, which is one of the first 49 short stories. That's actually one of his collections. And I love the last part of this. Hemingway wrote about a lot of things that more lately, people tend to be a little more critical of the subjects because he wrote about big game hunting, which is of course, not as, it's frowned upon now, shall we say. And this particular story, both of the stories I'm using as examples take place during big game hunts. Robert Wilson is his guide, the guide of Francis McComber and his wife in Africa. Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion, and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about McComber, except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful. So think about this, okay, what is he telling you in this in the sense that something has happened of a very profound nature. And that that nature has caused him to have this feeling and that the the image that he's creating here is that although he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful. I love that that to me, it conveys the feeling. And this is what I was saying about poetry. Now, having was the journalist, right? But notice this is more of a poetic technique. Seen something shameful, this is almost a metaphor. Because he did see something shameful. And we're going to we're going to find out more about that in a minute. So here's another Chandler quote, and this is actually the one he's probably most famous for if you if you ask somebody to quote Chandler, this is the quote that they're going to come up with. And this is from a short story that he wrote called Red Wind. There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Ana's that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like on nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Me, I feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. Now, I like this, because this takes you kind of through through dark and light, you know, you get you get the idea of the image of the wind, the feeling of the wind. And how it affects you in a way that I don't I don't think anybody else has ever described Santa Ana's this way. And then the the way that it ends with you can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. I just love that. That's sort of like a little kicker. So here's another Hemingway line. Again, from the short happy life of Francis McComer. This is now Francis McComer describing how he's feeling. We previously heard from the guide who had observed something that had, as you said, made him feel shameful. The fear was still there like a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been, and it made him feel sick. So you're getting this impression that something has happened that has been devastating. And even just from the single sentence, it's almost like a holograph, you know, where you take each part, and the part as the whole. So you can look at this and you kind of get the whole story from just the sentence. And it doesn't really say what happened, but it's telling you what happened in a very indirect way. Again, Hemingway was my example for journalism, but look what he's doing here. There are no extra words. It's very spare, but he's almost using the same kind of poetic techniques that we were talking about in the context of Chandler. So here are two descriptions of characters from Chandler, from short story. Actually, the basity blues is a short story. This is a second one. I like it a lot. It's from the novel The High Window, which was his first novel that he did not use his short stories to create. He had a long gray face that grumbled even when he wasn't saying anything. His trousers were frayed at the cups. And one of his heel worn black shoes contained an obvious bunion. His blue uniform coat fitted him the way a stall fits a horse. So the two, I mean, I love this whole paragraph, but the two things I love about it the most are the long gray face that grumbles even when he wasn't saying anything. That is amazing to me. And then the last line, his blue uniform coat fitted him the way a stall fits a horse. This is what he's famous for right there. The next description from 30 feet away, she looked like a lot of class from 10 feet away, she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. I like that. Again, he's not telling you what it is exactly that she looks like, but he's conveying an impression to you that tells you a lot. This line, again, the poetry thing with Hemingway, you know, as much as it's journalism, there's no extra words in this. This is all spare. But follow this. He slipped into the familiar lie. He made his bread and butter by that is a rhythm that almost if you had a couple more, a couple more syllables in there, you've got pretty close to Iambic pentameter, which again, that that flow helps move things forward. And that line is from one of his most famous short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. And we've got another couple of examples. We'll see here after the flash fiction section, we're going to talk about rewriting. So let's take a minute now that the whole thing about what we're trying to do is write short. And there is nothing shorter than flash fiction. It's a fictional work of extreme brevity. I got the second week out of Wikipedia, you know, why reinvent the wheel, that still offers character and plot development. And don't get the idea that flash fiction is new because it's not it's been around a very, very long time. And we're going to see an example from one of our two case studies here about how just how he has played out in this. There are many types of flash fiction. We have the six word story, we're going to look at that. The 280 character story known as Twitterature. As our social media platforms have evolved, and the character limits have increased, we see additional forms of flash fiction based on those. The dribble also known as the mini saga, which is 50 words, the drable known as micro fiction is 100 words, sudden fiction 750 words, flash fiction 1000 words, that's kind of like figure that that's going to be the average. And flash fiction will be the largest everything else will be shorter. I actually have done a little bit of flash nonfiction. This guy, this is this is somebody who I encountered just through a very strange process. Lou Beach is a guy who who started tweeting short stories. They are 420 characters in the length, he tweeted them. They were very successful. That is to say that people started following him on Twitter because of these stories. He subsequently collected them and published them and ended up on the best seller list in USA Today. He is the father of the guy who did my book cover. And I'd never heard of him before. His son is a collage artist. Turns out Lou Beach, his father was also a collage artist. He used to be the, what was he, he was one of the original graphic designers for slash magazine, the punk rock magazine. Interesting character. And in fact, he's going to be doing our storytelling event at Eleanor here in Long Beach, when we resume, which I'm hoping will be sometime early 2021. We'll see. So the six word story is bringing us back to our power in this timing way. His six word story, or rather the story that is attributed to him is right here. For sale, colon, baby shoes, never worn. That is an amazing six words. It tells a whole story right there. And it doesn't even say what it's about, but you get the idea. This story is often attributed to Hemingway. But even though he claimed there are some stories that he claimed to have won a bet by writing this, that there are suggestions that this actually predates Hemingway. So we don't really know if he wrote it or not. The fact is, that's a very powerful six words. And I would challenge you in our final writing prompt to try and write a six word story. I'm going to basically let you choose whatever form you want to write and write as much as you have time for. As much as we allow you to have time. So that's the six word story. I also I mentioned that I had some flash nonfiction. I wrote, I've written 80 stories using the 2000 character limit of Facebook posts. I had originally posted something I'd written. And these are all stories that are based on things that happen to me. I posted something and at the time, if you were over 2000 characters, Facebook would convert it into a note. And if somebody clicked on that, it would open a new window. And what I was discovering was people in Facebook didn't want to go there. So I thought, well, what if I reduce it to 2000, and it just keeps them in their own timeline and son of a gun? All of a sudden, people were reading the stuff I was writing. And I ended up writing like 80 of these things, which I call throwback Thursdays. And while they I'm saying they're nonfiction, some of the people that were referenced in the stories who are friends of mine have commented that my memory is somewhat faulty in regards to some of the things that happen. So you might call them fiction after all. Notice what this says, the fascinating me this that commentators have suggested that flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality in its ability to hit that or imply a larger story. This is this is great because this is talking about something that we're going to mention again in the rewriting section. But the idea of being able to convey more information with less. So there are some publications in print. There's flash the International Short Story magazine, and then a number of websites that publish short flash fiction. And these are things that you know, if you're interested in writing flash fiction, you should definitely check these out. Excuse me. These are places where you could potentially get published. So we're done talking about writing for now. I want to talk about rewriting and editing. And the first distinction I want to make is that rewriting and editing are not the same thing. When we talk about rewriting, we're talking about making substantive changes to the story or characters. We are not talking about correcting spelling errors when we're talking about rewriting. We're talking about changing what we've written based on either our own observations or the suggestions of an editor or a reader. Editing is really the correcting of spelling grammatical errors. Basically the purpose is to add clarity. And it's really about cutting superfluous material or to achieve a word count limit, which is kind of especially with the flash fiction important. This phrase, kill your children, we're going to see that. That is more, I think, perhaps appropriate of the rewriting part. Kill your children, incidentally, is an example of one of our poetic devices, which is a metaphor. We are talking about what happens when we rewrite. And, you know, as a writer, we spend a lot of time creating this stuff. And so when we go to rewrite it, our egos are in our way. So the first thing we need to do is make sure we do not let our egos get in the way. Let me go back a second. I had an experience working on my novel. I published a novel in 2017 called Persistence of Vision. And part of it takes place in Long Beach in 1929. One of the things that I had written had to do with a movie studio that was in Long Beach. And the plot revolved around something that they were working on, and it had to do with Laurel and Hardy. And a film that they made in 1929, which I thought they had made in Long Beach in the Wrigley District, because you can see oil wells in the background. And I thought that's got to be Signal Hill. So I thought I was all so smart. Six drafts into my novel, I decided to let people read it. And one of the people I let read it is my friend Chris Callard, who is also a writer, has published his own novel that takes place at the Pike. But he pointed something out to me. He said, you realize that that movie studio you're talking about was closed in 1916. So by 29, they were, they were hardly a memory. And I thought, oh my God, what am I going to do? I thought, well, I could just leave it the way it is and call it writer's license, right? That's our blanket excuse for anything we want to do as a writer. But I thought about it, I thought, well, hang on, what would it take to fix this? And so I looked at it, I thought, okay, well, where did they actually film that movie? And I found out they filmed it in the Chevyot Hills up in LA. And the studio that filmed it was in Culver City. And I thought, well, why don't I change it so that the studio that they're dealing with is the one in Culver City? And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to have to do an entire rewrite one entire draft, just to correct the geography of this change, because people are going places, they're driving their destinations, things they see on the I had to go through the entire novel and rewrite it to accommodate this change. So this is my point. This is not just adding commas. This is actually reconstructing something I spent a lot of time on. And so that's one example. Another example, which I'm going to share with you in a little while, had to do with backstory and introducing backstory into my novel. We'll talk about that in a bit. Hemingway actually wrote what was originally intended as the introduction to a textbook, which was going to be a collection of his short stories. His publisher suggested this. I mean, we love the idea. And he wrote this introduction, which when his wife Mary read this introduction, she thought, Oh, my God, this is really today, we would call it snarky. He was very sarcastic. And she felt that it would not. It would not do well for him. She suggested some significant rewrites. And he ignored them. And the project died on the vine. Then later on, he approached his publisher about converting this collection into a just a collection of his short stories, and suggested using this introduction that he'd already written for that collection in his publisher course, you know, hey, great, we're going to publish another Ernest Hemingway book. But then he read the introduction. And he suggested some rewrites to Hemingway, which were also ignored. And that project was abandoned. So, you know, the thing is, it's the ego that is preventing us from doing these changes that may be helpful to us. So the idea of getting out of your own way, it's kind of critical here. The fact is, we have a section of that, that piece that he wrote here in a few minutes, which will will be able to read, and you'll get the sense of the sarcasm and the tone, but it actually illustrates yet another point. So that was in Paris review, and I believe that was published in 1981. So let's talk about editing. So there's a great famous quote that's attributed to Ernest Hemingway, write drunk and edit sober. I don't know if you've heard this quote or not, but it is believed to be apocryphal. The part in the next two bullets is someone who actually asked him about this. And I love that his response that the idea of him takes, she says, is it true you take a picture of martinis up into the tower every morning when you go up to work? And his response was, you know, he was incredulous. And then he says you're thinking of Faulkner, which I thought is hysterical to blame Faulkner for this, that he ends with who in the hell would mix more than one martini at a time. And I'm thinking, okay, that that's true. I know that I've had a couple of martinis in my time. You would not make a picture and take it upstairs that that sort of defeats the purpose of the martini. But the point he's making here is that writing and editing are entirely different mental processes. One of the worst things a writer can do is to edit simultaneously, while they're writing. This is this is you are in your own way. Okay, so it's the most important thing is to make sure that you are either writing or editing and not trying to do both at the same time, because that is so self-defeating. You can write and edit in parallel by working on different parts of the story, or different stories. That's actually a good thing, because it gives you breaks and takes you out of, you know, what what you are working on and, and, and alternating behind between different projects can keep things interesting for you as a writer. And in a way, editing the previous day's work before you write is a good warm up. It helps remind you what you were doing. It gives you a sense of having completed that previous day's work. And you can now move on to the next the next part of your story. One of the techniques that Hemingway is particularly good at is, and you've probably heard this, start the story in the middle. And the point of this is that by starting the story in the middle, you have basically saved yourself the whole first part of the story. So brevity, by telling the story starting the middle, you can basically tell what happened in the first half of the story without having to tell that whole story. You can allude to it. You can make comments. You can create that whole original half of the story just by alluding to it. Starting in the middle can have a jarring effect, which is a great way of bringing a reader into a story. It startles it. And they immediately want to know what's going on here. And so here are a couple of examples from the two stories we've been talking about. The Snow is a Kiliman Jaro begins with this sentence. There are these two sentences. The marvelous thing is that it's painless, he said. That's how you know when it starts. Now, doesn't that make you go, what? What? What? It's painless. Great. But what? Why? What? You know, I want to read this, I want to find out what is going on here. Okay. I have another example from the short happy life of Francis McComber. It was now lunchtime, and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened. Well, something happened. I want to know what happened, don't you? When I talk about my novel, when I was working on my novel, I've written screenplays, I've written different forms. One of the things I realized when I started to write my screen, my novel was my opening was really the opening of a movie. I literally was writing the opening scene as though I was watching a movie in my head, which is great. But it occurred to me after I did that, I thought, you know, this is reading more like a screenplay and not not a piece of prose. What would happen if I started the scene in the middle? It's already happy. And so I rewrote it and improved it, I have to say significantly. It really went when you read the first sentence of my book, I'm very pleased to say it grabs you and makes you want to read more. Leaving things out. Now this is that the art of the short story intro that Hemingway wrote, this is part of it, but this is some good stuff here. This is this is Hemingway writing about short stories. And I think this is really key. A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something, because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit. I think this is really telling. I'm making another reference to my novel, but while I was writing, I mentioned this earlier, I got this idea that, you know, my story was about people who had served in World War One, and the main character had grown up in New York City in the turn of the 19th, 20th century. What I wanted to do was include some backstory. And so I wrote four chapters that I interposed into my novel. And each of those chapters took you back to a different part of his life. And you got where he came from, and you got his relationship with his father, and you got his relationship with his family, and all of this. And I read it, and I liked those chapters. But when I read them in context, I realized it totally took you out of the flow of the novel. So after having taken all this trouble to write them and put them in, I went back and took them out again. But a funny thing happened. That is that it left shadows in the novel that brought that backstory into it. I had, without realizing it, educated myself about the character of the point where, as I wrote the other parts of the book, I was writing that backstory into the book, without needing to have these chapters that would take you out of the flow of the whole thing. So I think that this is one of the most important lessons that you can take away from today is the stuff that you leave out, and how powerful that is. Because when you don't tell somebody something, what's the first thing they want? They want to know what it is, you're not telling them, right? So here's some tips for editing. Don't edit while you're writing. We talked about that two different mental processes. I really strongly recommend, and this comes from a guy who like I said, and will introduce me, I had the 120 pound typewriter. I strongly advise people to print hard copy of what they're writing out when they're editing, and mark it up with a pencil, and or colored pen or whatever, you know, whatever tool you prefer. Because it's honestly, it is way too easy to miss things when you're working off of a screen. For a lot of people who are younger, who have never worked, you know, on a typewriter and had to do that, you know, they might think, Oh, what a waste of time that is. It's it's not a waste of time. It helps you become more familiar with your work. It will give you a higher quality output, because you'll see things that you wouldn't see if it was on a screen. Here's another thing, read the story aloud. And that's not just to help the dialogue, although it does, it will help the entire story, because as you're reading it, you will hear where things don't work. That's something we'll just like, you know, clunk, and, and, oh, hey, make a note. I actually get to the point where I was thinking, you know, people had asked me about my novels, and they have you done an audio book. And I thought, you know, the next novel I write, I should do the audio book as sort of the last step in the editorial process. So I can listen to the audio book and see if I need to make any more changes. So I haven't done that. And finally, have somebody else read it. An editor is my best friend. And whether they're just a friend who, you know, knows you and likes you, that's great. Ideally, it would be someone who can give you some sort of insight into, you know, what kind of issues you're dealing with in the particular piece you're working on. So those are some suggestions for editing. And that takes us to our next writing prompt. I would like you to write a piece of flash fiction, and it's dealer's choice, whatever kind of flash fiction you'd like. And it doesn't necessarily even need to be within the pattern that we were talking about any of those. You want to write a six word short story, that that rock. I'm going to give you five minutes and just see if you can come up with something. Tell me a story that you can write in five minutes. Okay, Angela, you want to get us going on the timer? Okay, starting right now. Thank you. Okay, sorry. Time's up. I forgot to give you a heads up. Sorry. Okay, you give me 10 more, you know, I don't know 10 or 15 more seconds of you. That's okay. I think we're doing well on time. All right. So if you want to get started again. Yep. Okay, so who would like to share their flash fiction? If anybody wants to go, feel free to unmute yourself. And yeah, even if it's not finished, if you'd like to share what you were able to get done, I know five minutes is not very much time. Oh, oh, we got it. Okay. I tried to do the six, the six word thing. Okay, good. So I tried a couple one. I actually I don't match with each other. It's really technically a sentence. But I wrote fair mattress, fair bulb, no return. My next one. I had a hard time getting it down to six words, but faces hunched over inky waters. That's very evocative. Cool. Cool. So so writing a six word story is not an easy thing to do, right? No, not at all. Yeah. So I have to say that it just makes me think of that whoever wrote that baby shoes story. Oh my God, that is one of the best stories ever. Yeah, anybody else? Anybody else have anything they'd like to share? Again, I understand if it's not, if it's not complete, that's fine. And if you're not interested in sharing pieces that are not complete, that's totally fine as well. We can move just we can just move into this final section. I think Erica has something she'd like to share. Oh, were you raising your hand? And then I was trying to find my unmute button. Did you mean to be raising your hand? I was actually stretching. I was just yawning. Okay. This is definitely not finished. But it's going to be a short piece. I already have an idea of where it's going to go. Oh, cool. So Sarah was dreading the moment the men would ask. So where's the septic tank? She didn't know. How is this possible to own a piece of property and not know something so basic, so critical? The true answer was she hadn't asked, and the realtor hadn't mentioned it. Of course, she knew there was a septic tank, but its location, not a clue. She barely knew what a septic tank was. They began digging with a special pole attached to her hose, the water running to the right of the cabin behind it. Over and over, one of the men would cry out, I found it and tap the digging pole on something hard clanking for proof. But over and over, it turned out to be a rock. A cabin was built on a mountain of rock. That's as far as I got. You're up in the mountains, right? I am. I'm in right wood. Okay, cool. And this is a story that did actually happen this way. But the meaning of it is going to be more, there's an underlying meaning to it. But yeah, I had no idea where it was, and they had to come and pump it out, and I had no idea where it was. Yeah, it kind of matters where it is for them to be able to pump it out. Yeah. We used to have a place in Idlewild, and a septic tank. That was my experience with septic tanks. So I guess that's actually really, really well done. Thank you. And I would actually be interested in hearing where that goes. Yeah. And now I know where it is. And now you know where it is. That's pretty good. Alright, let's let's go ahead and move on then. And talk about marketing and promotion. So marketing promotion, this, this is not in the wheelhouse of most writers. We write because we enjoy writing. And ideally, we're, you know, we want to write, we don't want to spend our time doing marketing and promotion, but guess what? If you are interested in being published, that is something that you're going to have to do on some level or other. You know, things have changed in the marketplace with the advent of self publishing. A lot of stuff has happened now. Now self publishing, you know, we talk about novels, but the same kind of ideas apply to short story writers as well. So the first idea here is, you know, to know your market. This is a basic marketing concept is what we're who, you know, what are we selling? Who what is the market that we're selling into? And if you don't really know, and you're kind of interested in maybe writing something that's more commercial, find out what's popular. There are very easy ways to do this. When I was working on the last drafts of my detective novel, I read something that said that what was really huge at that moment were first person detective stories. And I thought, I have a third person detective story. And I thought, maybe I can just rewrite it to be a first person detective story. And so I embarked on a rewrite to change the perspective, the point of view of my story. And guess what? That is not easy. It is not a global search and replace kind of a thing. Because the point of view of your story is everything. So that was not a good idea. Romance, I actually personally know two writers who between them have, I'm going to say 100 books in basically bookstores, because they write in various aspects of the romance genre. And it's hugely successful. I mean, people mock it, but you know, I go into a used bookstore or even a new bookstore, but used bookstores, there's an aisle of romance books, you know, there are more romance books than any other genre. So that that is a very writer friendly genre. One of the things that I discovered was that hybrid genres were really big. And illustrating that you look at the what were the vampire werewolf stories that were so popular, they became films and so on. The romance, you know, it's like, oh, it's a vampire novel, but it's a romance. It's a werewolf novel, but it's a romance. So finding these hybrid genres is also really powerful marketing tool that you want to write to a market. That's up to you. So what are we talking about in terms of the big picture? If you are serious about writing, you could try and get an agent. One of my friends who actually was published in Wired and other magazines, at one point was considering getting an agent, his advice to me from his experience and talking to agents was that the only agent you want is the top tier. If you are looking at an agent who's not on the top tier, it's not really worth it. Now, that might be extreme. But if you look at what agents are for and what they do, they're basically people who have relationships with publishers. They lunch with them, and they can share, hey, I got this new writer, you know, would you be interested in their book? So you've got somebody who already has personal connections to the market that you're trying to get in. Or you could market to publishers directly. That is something that is still feasible. Not all publishers accept submissions, but that is something you can try. And then, you know, as I said, self-publishing, there are all kinds of ways that you can publish your stories yourself. The tools that are available for you to market writing include this list and others. If you're not familiar with the book, The Writer's Market, that is published every year. And really, you're not a writer if you don't have at least two copies of that on your bookshelves. I think at one point I had three. I don't think I ever even opened the first two copies. But here's the thing. When I was getting ready to start thinking about the reality of my novel being completed and publishing it, I started looking at Writer's Market and discovered that there's a whole section in it on pursuing agents and publishers. And I read what they said in that book and I'm going to tell you right now. Don't stop. Go get a copy of The Writer's Market and read that information because that will be very helpful to you. The rest of the book is a catalog of publishers and agents, their contact information, phone numbers, emails, any information that they have about publishers, including they do not accept unsolicited material. Okay. The Google. The Google is quite helpful as well because where the catalog in Writer's Market begins, Google can take you to their websites. So there are advantages to both approaches. But I think actually using them in concert is really the ideal. Facebook, create a page for what you're working on. You bring people to it. Let them know, hey, this is what I'm doing. You could create a website if you're ambitious or have someone created for you and publish your pieces there. I have 80, I think 80 pieces of nonfiction, flash nonfiction that I wrote in a section of my website that basically is to promote by writing. And then getting reviews if you are able to, and this could just mean somebody who is a name of some kind that's read your story that likes it, you can use that. You can use that to market your stories. I want to share with you something that happened that was really crazy when I was getting ready to think about marketing my novel and that is that day that I read the Writer's Market and got the picture. Here's what I need to do. I was part of a producing group and we would all basically support each other, producing partners. So one of them has a project he's doing and he needs somebody to help out. You know, we would help each other out. So the day I was looking at the Writer's Market thinking about this was the day before I had to start a project with these guys. I was helping I didn't even know what we were doing. We're going to get jumping a van and drive around Southern California interviewing people. And my job on the shoot was sound. And so I look at the Writer's Market. Here's the section on getting an agent getting a publisher. And I look at the catalog. And I think, well, you know, it'd be easier to deal with the catalog part online. And so I did my Google work and I start finding these people on the websites. What is it that they want? Because this is the key here. They tell you exactly what they want. Well, I think at that point, all right, well, I've got the beginnings of my marketing strategy. I'm going to put this aside. I've got this three day shoot. I'm going to have to go off and put this aside. And then when I come back, I'll resume my work on finding out what agents want. And so the next morning, this van rolls up, picks me up, drive off. And I say, so by the way, what are we working on? And they tell me we're interviewing agents and publishers about what they want. I am not kidding. I spent the next three days driving around in this van going to publishing houses, interviewing publishers, going to agents, offices and homes, interviewing agents about what they want and how they want to be approached. And for those agents and publishers that want to be approached, it's very simple. Do what they want. Do what they want. So when you look at their website, they're going to say they take submissions or not. Okay. If you're really hardcore, you could find an email address if you really were persistent, you wanted to do that. I'm not sure that's worth your time because they're telling you already we don't take submission and solicited submissions. And you know, there are legal reasons for that. And that supersedes everything else. It's liability. They don't want to take submissions that are not solicited because if some time in the future, somebody's piece shows up or another piece that resembles it, and it comes out that they had received this submission, that could be bad for them. And so their lawyers tell them, don't do this. Don't take unsolicited submissions. We don't need them. We've got plenty, you know, so do exactly what is asked. So one that went for those that indicate that they are willing to take submissions, they're going to ask you for a writing sample. What form of writing sample do they want? Do they want it to be attached to the email or do they want it to be in the body of the email? Whatever they're asking you to do, make sure you do it. If they give you a word count, Max, make sure that you adhere to it. And further, when you've edited that down to whatever the word count is they're asking for, remember, somebody else may want the same word count. So save it in a file name with the word count as part of the name. So you can reuse it easily later. I mean, you're going to have to do this over and over and over again if you're serious about it. Another note here that's very important is that some agents and publishers will not look at work or won't consider publishing work that's been previously published. What that means is not necessarily in a magazine or an anthology. Some agents and publishers count publishing it on the internet as being published. And if you published your story on your website, that counts and they won't look at it. So keep that in mind. All right. We have come to the point where I would like to entertain questions. Angela, you want to open it up and see if anybody has any questions? Yeah, sure. If anybody has any questions you'd like to submit in chat, you can do that or raise your hand. Let me know you have a question. Michael wanted to know could you offer a more explicit example of writing while editing? He asks because he often wonders if he should delete anything that he writes or should he use the strike through feature if he decides to restructure a sentence or modify an idea? My thinking is that so the example of writing and editing at the same time is you're editing as you're writing the same sentence and you stop yourself and you go back and change it. That kind of writing you'll generate about a paragraph a day because you're in a way you're second guessing yourself. The key to writing is to find your flow. In fact, I did a workshop in the Anaheim Central Library that was partly based on the book, Writing in Flow by Susan Perry, Dr. Susan Perry. She's a psychologist who writes for Psychology Today and is also a published novelist and she writes about writing and she wrote a book called Writing in Flow in which she interviewed a bunch of famous authors about what the experience of flow was like, which is the antithesis of writer's block. And I did this workshop on how to facilitate writer's writing in flow using meditation exercise and time management. So it was a trippy strange workshop, but it was interesting because it really worked. The ideas that I presented, you know, when you start writing, you don't want to interrupt it. You want the process to be able to just continue and the editing thing interferes with that. And the editing thing comes from, like I said, second guessing ourselves, which is to say, I don't really know what I'm doing. You know what? You do. You totally know what you're doing. The only person that can stop you is yourself. So when you're writing, let yourself write and if you feel the inclination to start marking it up while you're writing, don't do that. Let yourself write an entire section of it at least and then go back and edit it. But do that in a separate time and space even so that you can help encourage that different part of your brain, whatever it is. I'm not a physiologist, not a brain physiologist, but it may not be as simple as, you know, right left brain. But it is really a different mental process and they are not compatible. So that's my point there. Okay. So to clarify, basically I really need to be more of a runaway freight train. Yes. Okay. Embrace the freight train. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm just like, oh, that, you know, I'm just like, I don't want to edit too much. But I'm like, oh, no, that's not the word I wanted or no, this is a better idea. So it's almost like, I guess if I just put it all out there, I can always, as you say, go back and decide. Right. Yeah, this second idea was the better way. Yeah. Okay. Um, I do a lot of different kinds of creative things. I paint, I write, play music. I learned things about the creative process from all of these different pursuits. And it's funny because they all end up working together in different ways, you know, and I can apply things I learn as a musician to my writing. I learned things as a painter. I can apply to my writing. It's really, really interesting. So the, and it's really just about being creative and letting yourself have that creative flow. Don't stop yourself. Let the train go. Anybody else? Okay, Stephen. Yeah, I just want to mention we're at four o'clock now. So if anyone needs to leave right away, we want to thank you again for joining us. Oh, absolutely. But if you have any other questions for Stephen and you can't stay, please leave a message in the chat with your email contact info and Stephen can follow up with you at a later time. Otherwise, we will hang around until 4.15 and then we'll wrap things up. But we do have a few more questions. Emmy wants to know if you can talk about your process as a writer, what does a day as a writer look like for you and also what is the author's name again that you had mentioned earlier? And we have a few other questions after her. Okay, the author I mentioned was Susan Perry, P-E-R-R-Y. She was in a writing group that I belong to. She and her late husband Stephen Perry was a great poet. Her book is called Writing in Flow and I believe you can still get it. She published a novel called Kylie's Heel a couple of years ago and I think you can still get that too. My process is I like to do my writing in the morning. That's my most productive time. But to say that I would have to say 50% of my novel was written on airplanes in sports bars at airports. I was traveling for work and I wrote every day that I could. My rule of thumb was if I only had five minutes in the morning before my ride got there or before I had to leave then I would write for five minutes and if I produced one sentence that got me that much further to my goal. And that feels good. You know honestly when you can walk out and say well I did some writing today it was only a sentence but I got a sentence written it. You know I like to I think I'm a little ADD or maybe a lot ADD. So having multiple things to work on is helpful to me because if my mind starts to do the chatter thing it means I'm saturated maybe on this project. So having another piece to work on whether it be you're writing another piece or you're editing another piece or editing the same piece. To be able to break the activities up I also like to drink coffee which is why I do my writing in the morning I think largely. Drink coffee right I mean doesn't get any better than that you know. And it's like I said so writing in a sports bar I'm not a sports fan so I'm not paying attention to what's going on on the 30,000 large screen televisions around the room and the fact that the people are all talking I don't hear what they're saying I'm hearing white noise. And you know it's part of that time management aspect of just how do you how do you find the time to write? I happened to have a lot of downtime because I was traveling and it was spent in hotels it was spent in airports on airplanes and I would just thank God you know I wasn't lugging a typewriter around especially when it was as heavy as that underwood was. But the idea was just you do it when you can and then for me it's a luxury then to be able to sit down at home on the weekend and just know you've got like three hours to do nothing but work on your writing. So that's that's my process that's I hope I answered your question. Okay we had one question from Sophia do you have any tips for writing children's books? Um I have not written a children's book uh so I'm not really an expert on that um but obviously you're going to write to a certain age group I think that's one of the criteria is that the books a children's book is really a book directed at a specific age range. Um you know is it a book the child is going to read or is the book that parents is going to read to the child uh and you know I mentioned Charlotte's web earlier that the E.B. White um these are classics. I would suggest reading some of the kinds of books that you'd like to write. In fact I suggest that to all of you regardless of what genre you're interested um there are two things a writer can do to help become a better writer. One is writing and the other is reading and I like you know I I know who I like and I know I read them and then I reread them and I honestly you know I talk about Raymond Chandler I have read all of his short stories three times now. I've read all of his novels from five to ten times each um every time I read them I get new insights into what he's doing and it helps me clarify my own methods and approaches by by learning more about him. Also read their early work that is so important because we tend to put people up on pedestals uh because what we're looking at is the work that they have gotten to not the work that they did when they were starting out like us right um go read that stuff because that makes you feel better. It's not all as good as what you have been reading thinking I want to do that. You read the first story that the person wrote you get a different perspective of them but you'll also see why they got to the point where they were right. Any other questions? Um it looks like that's all we have in the chat um just to wrap up um if anybody if you have any other questions please go ahead and submit them we still have a few more minutes but otherwise I just want to mention that if people have more questions um or interest in short story writing or fiction writing in general um you know we have lots of resources in our collection here at the library as well as well as online resources so please check out our online catalog and our website uh our digital library for more details there and uh I have one quick question for you. They have my novel you can get my novel from the library. There you go you can check it out right here um is there anything you know that you might want to contribute um regarding you know what do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of your writing or publishing journey? One word persistence that's it and that's really the key to everything right yeah um when I was younger I was not as persistent as I am now and it's kind of a joke to me that the title of my novel is persistence of vision because that's it you know you you know what you want to do it took I gotta I gotta admit this it took me 25 years to write that book part of that was because I was writing on airplanes writing in hotels right you know but part of it was it just took that long because I had never written a novel I needed to learn how to write a novel by writing a novel and that takes long plus I did that crazy stuff adding things in and taking them out and that adds a few drafts I think I the final draft was 18 so okay we had one more question from Michael how do you motivate yourself to write during the tough days are there any games we can play with ourselves and do rewards work well you know if if if that works for you um that's great I love rewarding myself um but in a way it to me the reason I'm writing is because I love writing the feeling I get from the process that that seeing well let me just tell you the day I held my novel in my hands for the first time was one of the most amazing days I've ever had in my life and I've had some amazing days um it's it's and and it you know like I said it took 25 years I'm holding 25 years with the work in my hands right and I was proud of it too I had help with her but you know anyway other questions um I just had a contribution to that um for writing that I was doing in graduate school trying to finish a thesis um I think the best tip that I ever found was actually at the very end of role dolls book the wonderful story of Henry sugar and other short stories and the very last story that he had in there was about his writing process and his advice was to never stop writing never stop your writing at any given time until you knew exactly what you were going until you knew what you were going to be saying when you picked up again so you were in the middle of an idea and you knew where it was going to go that would be a good time to maybe take your break and walk away because you knew how you would be picking up again and then you could continue with that and then don't stop until you know where you're going but if you continue a thought to its completion and then you take your break you may come back to an empty screen and empty thought is like oh god where do I go from here so his suggestion that worked for him and it worked for me too was don't stop to take a break until you already have an idea going that you can easily pick up on that note one of the things that i was doing i think this speaks to what michael was asking uh is i start i had a period where i was not working so i was able to write for three out i wrote from nine to noon every day five days a week um at noon i stopped myself i literally i might feel like i could continue but i would stop myself but i would stop myself in the middle of a sentence and just leave that and the next day i would sit down and there was this unfinished sentence and i knew where the sentence was going yeah and that would take me to the next day's writing yeah and i mean literally the the novel i wrote i did not know where it was going when i started it the way i wrote it as i did a year's worth of research and made soup and then sat down one weekend in palm desert and i decided okay let it rip and i started writing it and by the end of that morning i'd written my first chapter and my main character was dead and i went well that was helpful yeah what am i going to do now and i said well tomorrow you're going to come out here by the pool and you're going to sit down and you're going to write the second chapter and i did and my main character came in out of nowhere yeah and i don't i to this day i don't know how i came up with this guy he literally manifested and i just took it ran with it okay because steven i asked um the other part of that is i definitely have been known to leave a sentence undone and then return to it um if not the next day in like 10 minutes it just depends but sure ideas for stories often come to me where i see the ending of it and i'm sometimes trying to write my way forward um there's like a you know there's like a trilogy of books where i've seen how each one begins and ends right and and so it's like trying to fill in the middle and so there are times when i'm like i don't know where i am with this thing so i just have you know they say the second act is the hardest yeah right because you know we come up with the beginnings and the endings it's how do we get from one to the other that's the big question okay yeah second act is the that's the greatest writer's challenge right there yeah because i just started the second book in a trilogy although the first one's still not done i'm doing national novel writing month so you just write oh yeah and so i just i just yesterday what came out was beginning of the second book and i said well where is this thing going um you know it's like i have book titles but i'm like uh quite no so i just i just wondered like you know there are days like that i'm like i don't know and those are tough days and so i don't know if i'm supposed to just kind of plow through i don't want to cultivate the bad habit if i must have some reward or trinket to write that day right or you know that there are other things you can write to that might help stimulate you like honestly one of the best things i ever did was do poetry you know when i was younger i didn't really i wasn't a poet i wrote mostly prose and screenplays but um well some people who were poets and they were amazing poets uh and i started writing my own poetry and it taught me things that have come back to help my prose writing which is actually what led me to write this presentation today okay you know uh i did like the good line comparison with that thank you okay yeah i think grocery lists anything else pardon no i say grocery lists are kind of my thing to kind of either that or to do list um and it just kind of pulls me and i'm like okay i can do this now cool so okay well that it's good you got to know yourself that's one of the most important things so anybody else all right i think that's pretty much it and it's 415 now so i think we're going to wrap up there but i'd like to thank steven again for today's wonderful local history lecture series program on writing short stories and for your gracious support of our educational enrichment of our Long Beach Public Library community i'd also like to thank our library administration and staff friends the library the Long Beach Public Library Foundation many other local contacts for helping to promote our event so with that i'd like to express our sincerest thanks and appreciation again to everyone have a wonderful afternoon and we'll see you again soon thank you for joining us and i want to thank you all um i want to thank angela and and jade for the support on the program today i want to thank all of you who attended and i would like to thank marie reedy who was the librarian who drove that bookmobile i was telling you about earlier yes well thank you again for all of your great questions everybody and thank you for joining us and steven again you knocked it out of the ballpark so thank you thank you and we'll please join us thank you join us again soon everyone have a great day and a very happy thanksgiving so thanks again take care everyone okay bye