PROSE CLASS AT THE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE

HELEN HAGEMANN’S PROSE CLASS

This coming Friday 21st March@ 10.00am the prose class is in Room 3 and also on 4th April.

Our Monthly Critiquing

First hour of the class will be a critiquing session. Writers are reminded to bring a 2 page, double spaced “scene/chapter” of a novel, or 2 pages of a short story.  Please Times New Roman, size 12!

PLEASE NOTE:  Also bring enough printed copies to distribute to your fellow writers.

Second Hour – class will read an action scene from Nicholas Evans’The Horse Whisperer. A writing exercise and discussion will revolve around the inclusion of action scenes within the narrative of your novel or short story.

A forty-ton truck hurtles out of control on a snowy country road, a teenage girl on horseback in its path. In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother’s quest begins–to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to the Horse Whisperer.
He is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heal broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of this ancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.
Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, and their wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has risked everything–her career, her marriage, her comfortable life–in her desperate belief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrim savage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should be destroyed. But Annie won’t give up on him, for she feels his fate is inextricably entwined with that of her daughter, who has retreated into a heartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, something in Grace will die too.

http://www.nicholasevans.com/books/the-horse-whisperer/description/ 

This Scene is Huge on Action
The book begins with the frightful accident: teenage Grace Maclean, daughter of nice-guy lawyer Robert and tough, English-born magazine editor Annie, is out riding near their country home in upstate New York on a snowy day, and she and her beautiful horse Pilgrim are hit by a skidding tractor-trailer. Grace is crippled, Pilgrim desperately injured and mentally shattered.

On the Action Scene

“This scene type will certainly drive the reader forward, but be warned that people have a tendency to skim action scenes, driven forward with their urgency, so you will want to balance them with other types of scenes,” says Jordan E. Rosenfeld.

Venue: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1 Finnerty St. Fremantle
Room: 2 - Upstairs in the north wing
Starts: Friday (fortnightly) on 7th February, 2014
Time: 10.00am til noon
Cost: $20 (OOTA members), $25 (non-OOTA members)