New from OOTA: Prose Critiquing Class

NEW - Prose Critiquing Class to be held after Helen Hagemann's class each Friday fortnight. Commences this week, Friday, 2nd October at 3pm and will be convened by Robert Jeffreys. Jeffreys is a NIDA graduate and has been a professional actor, a Drama and English teacher, and has had two plays produced by Lyons Productions at The Blue Room, others at the Black Swan Theatre Company and the Perth Theatre Company. He has also written two dramas for ABC Radio, and is now concentrating on short fiction. Writers please note:  Please bring enough copies to hand around, maximum three pages of prose (any genre), typed in Times New Roman, 1.5 spacing.

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Prose Workshop: Writing "HOOKS" Friday 2nd October @ FAC

Prose Workshop: Writing "Hooks" with Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre, Friday 2nd October 1pm-3pm.  Class to read extracts of Prologues from The Casual Vacancy, The Secret River and Shallow Breath, together with writing exercises and discussions on Novel /Short Story/ Non-Fiction beginnings as "Hooks".



A Great Hook usually comes at the beginning of the work.
The hook is that tiny, important little bit of awe you have to plant in readers’ minds. This is not always planted in a first chapter, but authors often use a "prologue" to spark a reader's curiosity. With short stories it is usually the opening sentence, such as the opening lines in Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

     During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the
     autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the
     heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a
     singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself,
     as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the
     melancholy House of Usher.

The hook isn’t a singular entity. There’s not just one of them. There has to be many of them, and if your book starts with a Prologue as a hook, then continue the same somewhere close by; either in Chapter 1 as Rowling does, or at least within the first 5,000 words. If you wish to 'Set the Stage' Dickens's opening prologue in A Tale of Two Cities is a good example.

         It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of 
         foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light,
        it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had 
        everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all
        going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of 
        its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative 
        degree of comparison only.

If you're writing memoir, non-fiction or biography, you can open the work with an "Introduction". An Introduction is usually for the following purposes:
•To talk about how you came to write the book, especially if that will help draw the reader into the book.
•To sell the book to the potential reader/​buyer (lure them, hook them, make them want to read more). In The Secret River, Grenville has William Thornhill thinking about a sentence of death in England perhaps being a far better fate than the harsh life/climate of the NSW penal colony.
•To answer the question: why this book? why now? why this person? why by this author?
•To talk about how you got the information — what main sources (and how they differ from other books on the subject, such as book #24 about Sir Donald Bradman, for example).

Obviously, this makes our work a lot harder, since we have to continue thinking of hooks to keep piquing our readers’ curiosity. However, the first hook we come up with doesn’t have to be monumental to keep the reader's attention. Rather, the first hook just has to interest them long enough to get them to the next hook, and perhaps when that particular question has been answered (or the information shown in the Prologue has made sense in the early part of the novel), then it will be that time when the reader is well on their way to discover the drama of the story. Of course, there are many kinds of hooks (ie. tension/ suspense/ problems/ obstacles/ or the inciting incident) in which case you've probably created a page turner. Alternating different characters' stories in chapters is also a great hook! You only have to read Larry Brown's Father and Son to see how that's done. Good luck!

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Workshop: Free Indirect Speech with Helen Hagemann, FAC Friday 18th September

Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann, Friday 18th September. Class to read three extracts of  "Free Indirect Speech" from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Virginia Woolf's short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street, and Ian McEwan's Atonement. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around "free indirect speech" and other narrative modes.

1.00pm - 3.00pm: Room 3, Upstairs, FAC North Wing
OOTA $20 - NON-OOTA $25

Free indirect speech is a style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech. (It is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or discours indirect libre in French.) Randall Stevenson suggests, however, that the term free indirect discourse "is perhaps best reserved for instances where words have actually been spoken aloud" and that cases "where a character's voice is probably the silent inward one of thought" should be described as free indirect style.

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