How to Trigger the Theater of the Mind
Jerry Jenkins and David Loy
Workshop #7 Unedited Transcript Watch or listen here
“How to Trigger the Theater of the Mind”
*The purpose of this transcript is to help you follow along with the lessons in the video. For this reason, the contents have not been extensively edited for grammar and punctuation.
David: Hi and welcome to this month’s live online workshop presented exclusively for you as a member of the Jerry Jenkins Writers Guild. I’m your host, David Loy and today’s workshop is titled, “How to Trigger the Theater of your Reader’s Mind.” Your trainer for this intense is of course, Jerry Jenkins. As you know, besides serving as your virtual writing coach, Jerry remains an active author himself. Currently, he’s working on his 190th book. He’s written 21 New York Times bestsellers and he sold more than 70 million books. Welcome Jerry, how are you doing today?
Jerry: I’m doing great David and as always, I’m eager to dive into today’s content but can I tell a quick grandkid story first?
David: Absolutely.
Jerry: Well, we’ve got my 2nd son, Chad’s here with his 4 kids and the little guy you see on the screen right now, Micah, he’s 6 years old. Yesterday morning, he was playing with a lightsaber when I got up, I’m an early riser and Micah was playing with a lightsaber and was being noisy. I said, “You better put that away until your dad gets up, until grandma gets up because
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 2
you’re going to wake them up.” He tossed it on the couch and folded his arms and gave me a pout and he says, “I guess I’ll just have to use the force.”
David: Stories like that trigger images in my mind, I can just see as if I were there with you.
Jerry: Well, that’s a good segway into today’s topic because evoking images is so crucial to the writing process.
David: Well, it must be because more than once I’ve heard you refer to this idea of triggering the theater of the reader’s mind and I reminded our attendees today of your writing credits though as members of the guild, I’m sure they’re well aware of your experience but I did this because I wanted to establish again that you never approach these training sessions as merely a theory or someone reflecting on some bygone career. You’re still in the trenches everyday putting this stuff into practice.
Jerry: That’s true David and while I never want to come across as a know it all or imply that my way is the only way, I do want to teach only those techniques that I find still work in actual practice.
David: Great. I know you’ve got a lot to cover today but let’s make clear right off the bat exactly what you’re talking about. What does it mean to trigger the theater of your reader’s mind?
Jerry: Well, I’ll give an example, here’s something that we hear all the time and probably say it ourselves. When we see a movie based on a book we’ve
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 3
read, even if we absolutely love the picture, so often we say, “But the book was better.”
David: We do, I do, why is that?
Jerry: Well I think it’s because not even Hollywood with all its glitz and glamour and high tech CGI capability can compete with the theater that resides in our own brains. I happen to be a person of faith who believes God created us and gave us these incredible high tech processors between our ears. Regardless of whether you attribute this to the creator, you have to admit, your brain is a miraculous contraption. When I read a book, my mind conjures images of everything the author describes but also, more astoundingly, it paints pictures for me of things the author only suggests and sometimes doesn’t mention at all. That’s why I think that we occasionally remember books we’ve read as if they had pictures in them when they don’t.
David: That’s why you’re saying that not even Hollywood can compete with the theater of our reader’s mind?
Jerry: Exactly, that’s why we always say the book was better.
David: Okay, so this session is going to deal with how we can best take advantage of that reality.
Jerry: That’s the plan David, it’s really about involving your reader in the story telling process, allowing him the pleasure, the treat, the privilege of discovering things on the wide screen of his mind without having to spoon feed him every detail. Now, let me just toss in on the side here, I’m referring
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 4
to the reader as the singular he so I don’t have to keep referring to the cumbersome him and her, him or her or he or she. We can all agree that that means that for a typical reader of either gender that we should all have in mind when we write even though most writers and readers are women. I’ll use the “he” here to refer to the reader.
David: All right, fair enough, now back to your point, correct me if I’m wrong but I heard a subtle but important difference there. You’re not suggesting we show our story in the theater of our reader’s mind but rather that we give him enough information to trigger his own imagination and he can show his own movie of our story in the theater of his mind, is that right?
Jerry: Well that’s the takeaway value from this session. You could just adjourn the meeting and we can all be on our way.
David: I don’t think any of us want that, I know you certainly have a lot to show us that will teach us exactly how to do what you’re recommending.
Jerry: I do.
David: Okay, am I right when I get the impression that this fits in with some broader foundational principles of yours like thinking reader first or giving the reader credit and it’s a sin to bore your reader?
Jerry: All right, now you’re just playing teacher’s pet.
David: Well, it just seems that by triggering the theater of the reader’s mind, we make him a partner rather than just an audience member.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 5
Jerry: Right again so you get the gold star today.
David: Well thank you. Now, let me remind everyone that as usual, our training is followed by a live question or answer session during which you may ask Jerry questions that arise out of his teaching today. Be thinking of your questions, have them ready to type in once Jerry is finished presenting and as always, we’re going to get to many questions as possible in our allotted time. Make sure to take full advantage to this personal access to Jerry Jenkins. Okay, Jerry, the floor is yours, show us how to trigger the theater of the reader’s mind.
Jerry: Sounds good David, here we go. If you’re a visual learner like I am and it helps you to take notes as we go, feel free to do that. Don’t worry if you’re unable to get everything down as I fly through this, I’m going to cover a lot of ground and leave more time than usual today for that live Q&A session. We may have an extra 10 of 15 minutes by the time we get through here besides the half hour we already have allotted. Remember that this is being recorded and it will be archived in our landing page. on the guild’s site within about 48 hours from now. You’ll have full access to it as many times as you want, 24/7. Also, though this takes a little more time, we also post a full transcript of the session in PDF form. You can download that, read it, whatever you need to do.
My goal today is to help you paint more vivid pictures with your writing. Ironically, that’s going to mean less description rather than more. I’ll cover techniques to help you spark the reader’s senses, get that projector running in the theater of his mind and avoid anything that gets in the way of that. Let me define the theater of the mind, it’s simply your reader’s imagination and if Hollywood can’t compete with it, nothing you write will ever be able
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 6
to either. Your hope, your plan should be to trigger it, ignite it. As David and I discussed, that’s why we almost always say, “The book was better than the movie.” Truly engaging the reader’s brain gives him an unlimited canvass or movie screen if you will onto which he can project virtually anything. If you can get your reader to see your story in his mind’s eye, you’ll keep him turning the pages till the end.
That doesn’t mean describing everything in detail, remember you’re stimulating the theater of the mind, not doing its job. Here’s a little assignment for you to try on your own when this session’s over, see if you can describe an orbital character, a minor character with one word like oily, dour, puckish, dismissive, haughty. Allow your reader to interpret that and view that character any way he wishes. The larger the role the character plays in your story, the more you can say about what he looks like but still reframe from spelling out every detail. You leave to your reader the fun of filling in the blanks with his own imagination. Here’s how I described an orbital character in my novel, Left Behind. This is a character who eventually grew into a more important player. When I first described him, I simply wrote this, “Ritz was tall and lean with a weathered face and a shock of salt and pepper hair.” Let me read that to you again then I want to point out what I did not do in the brief description.
I had established that Ritz is a pilot that flies private jets so we know that about him. Here’s the description again, “Ritz was tall and lean with a weathered face and a shock of salt and pepper hair.” Think about what that made you imagine, what are you picturing in your mind? Now notice, I didn’t describe how tall or how lean he was but I bet you have a mental image neither did I say anything about his teeth. So often beginning writers want to describe even teeth are gleaming white or yellow or broken, what
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 7
did you see? I mentioned nothing about the color of his eyes which I probably would have done had he been my main character.
It’s perfectly fine with me if a million readers all see Ritz with a different shade of pigment in his eyes. I didn’t reveal his age but did you form a rough idea from my mentioning about the salt and pepper hair? Further, did the word shock, the shock of salt and pepper hair give you another clue about him, how casual he might be about personal grooming or it just isn’t important to him? Each reader can see this character anyway he wishes and why not? Now, in creating believable main characters, it’s important to remember this, making them real and knowable doesn’t mean overwhelming the reader with description. We’ve established that you can’t compete with the reader’s imagination anyway so what’s the harm in a thousand readers seeing a thousand different versions of your main character?
Sure, all readers need know of your hero’s gender, general size, maybe hair or eye color. After all, this is your story’s perspective character so a little more detail may be called for, perhaps even the timbre of their voice. It should also emerge whether you lead is athletic or strong or nimble enough to accomplish some difficulty task that your plot requires. The day is long past where the author should be describing hair and eye lash lengths, the curve of the lip, the shade of the complexion as if it’s from some color chart, the breadth of the hands and fingers unless it plays a part in the story. Again, remember, we want to leave some of the fun to the reader’s imagination.
Now, I’m going to run down a long list of things to avoid when triggering the theater of your reader’s mind. It’s easy to overdo descriptions of
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 8
settings. I do it sparingly because as a reader, I find most description deadly boring. Think about it, how many ways can you describe sunrises, sunsets, moonlight, peaking through tree branches. Now, if you could handle description the way Charles Frazier does in his debut masterpiece novel, “Cold Mountain”, you’d never lose my attention. Here’s a taste from Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, “The hay field beyond the beaten dirt of the school playground stood pant waist high and the heads of grasses were turning yellow from need of cutting. The teacher was a round, little man hairless and pink of face, he owned but one rusty black set of clothes and a pair of old overlarge dress boots that curled up at the toes and were so worn down that the heels were wedge like. He stood at the front of the room rocking on the points.” Some writers make you want to emulate them, Frazier makes me want to just surrender and simply read. If you can come close to what he’s done there, go for it. For me, the best description suggests just enough to ignite the reader’s mind. A perfect example comes from the late great mystery writer, John D. MacDonald who once described a character … Remember our little assignment of trying to do with one word, he described a character simply as “knuckly”.
I don’t know about you but that evokes a complete picture in my mind and reminds me that less is more especially when one single word is that evocative and carefully chosen. Now, at the Daily Post writing website, Krista is writing coach and she writes, “Description and detail translate what’s in your imagination into scenes and images in the reader’s mind. Can bloated description detract from your work, fill your reader’s brain with too much information and distract him from the story? The answer is yes.” Now, as far as knowing when enough is enough when it comes to
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 9
detail and description, Canadian author, Lisa Moore advocates giving the reader control.
She says that to her as a reader and I quote, “The strongest fiction allows me to create it in my head.” As a writer, I like to give the reader as much control as possible, that’s where the real pleasure lies. Lisa Moore maintains that, “Stories shift and morph depending on the reader and his experiences.” She says that, “Stories never belong solely to the author, they’re also a creation of each individual reader. The reader’s imagination gives the story shape and substance.” On this topic of when less can be more, Jami Gold, a paranormal novelist blogging and writing stuff a few years ago said that, “For many things in life, more is better like when a package contains a bonus 10% extra or is now even bigger.” She says, “In writing, that doesn’t always apply. Sure, make your love stories more passionate, your action more dramatic, your dialogue more tense, your suspense more taught but more adverbs and adjectives don’t make our writing better.
Powerful writing is a thing of nouns and verbs. Excessive word counts often indicate fluff and going into excruciating detail about every item in a room is sure to bore your reader.” Miss Gold says, “We especially tend to make these mistakes when we first start writing, we describe every smile, sigh and nod until they become clichés. We hear we should add specifics so rather than just mentioning the hero ran through the trees we say, he ran through the oak trees or even worse we say there was a mixture of some dappled, old growth oak and maple trees. We figure if some detail is good, more is better but you see how that just slows the story and slows the action and makes the reader aware of the writer. Is some detail is good, more is better? No. too much detail causes problems from word count to boredom
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 10
but there’s another issue with too much information that we might not think about which takes us back to our main point, we need to leave the reader room to use his imagination.
You’ve heard me harp on showing rather than telling and in fact we have a whole live online workshop on that subject so check that out when you get time. Jami Gold says that, “Often, what makes a scene feel shown instead of told isn’t about how many details we stuff in but how deeply we’ve pulled the reader into the story and we do that best by engaging his imagination.” Don’t include too much stage direction, describing every minuscule action. Here’s an example of a sentence that does that, “With her left hand she steered the baby carriage and with the other she dug in her pocket for her keys.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with that writing and you can see it but instead, we should give the reader the basics and his imagination will fill in the rest. Something like this, “Steadying the carriage, she dug for her keys.” We don’t need to be told which hand did what or even if she used her hands, we can assume that. Less information equals more imagination.
Miss Gold is like me in that she doesn’t nail down all the background details of her characters before she starts. I’m a pantser, I write by the seat of my pants. The character reveals himself to me as I write. Only by leaving our characters room to breathe in our imaginations do they become living entities rather than puppets. My approach to description, do it extremely well like Frazier or leave it out. Try to trigger the reader’s theater of the mind by choosing precise, evocative descriptors and remember that less is
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 11
more, that’s the way to be sure you don’t lose your readers in the first 10 pages.
Instead, I’m advising you to do the opposite, don’t dictate what your readers should see. We mature as novelists and artists when we come to realize that the reader is our partner in the effort and wants, needs a place in the experience. K. M. Weiland is a novelist and writing coach and she’s an award winning internationally published author of 2 bestselling writing books, “Outlining your Novel” and “Structuring your Novel”. She says, “No story is created by one person. Written by one person, yes, but if the only imagination involved is the writer’s, the story will never be anything more than black marks on the page. When readers decide to join hands with us, they are in essence becoming our co-writers.” Weiland adds that, “Our job is to guide the reader’s imagination while theirs is to put their imagination to work. The story his mind projects will never be exactly the one we or even his fellow readers see.” Weiland admits that this can frustrate the average control freak writer who doesn’t readers messing with or missing the smallest detail of the story.
Once a reader invests in a story by recreating it in his own imagination, he owns that story as much as we do.” Dwight Swain in his book, “Creating Characters” says, “Your reader knows your story isn’t real, isn’t true but in his role of fiction fan, on an unconscious level, he pretends it’s true, accepts it and lives through it with the characters.” What does this idea of the reader as our co-writer mean to us? It means we have to be willing to relinquish a bit of control. In a Writer’s Digest interview with Jessica Strawser, novelist Chris Cleave said this, “Trust your reader from the sentence level, you don’t need to hammer a point home all the way through to the level of the whole novel.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 12
You can trust your reader to let you write about difficult, complicated subjects. Readers do have the creative work.” Cleave adds that to understand the balance of power between author and reader, all we have to do is consider our own reading experiences. What authors have given you the greatest amount of creative control in their stories and as a result emotional investment and which have hoarded the co-writing responsibilities and prevented you from adding your own imaginative flourishes?
The reader isn’t an enemy or a doop, he wants to love your story, he wants you to sweep him off his feet into a world of excitement and insight. He can’t wait to be your partner so do whatever you can to reward that enthusiasm. Paul Auster is a bestselling Brooklyn based novelist, he says this, “The book doesn’t belong only to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well and then together, you make it what it is.” Sometimes, not always, even editors get in the way of this partnership and want the author to do all the work. In Left Behind, I described a computer techy as oily.
My editor said he needed more, I said, “Really, why?” He said, “Well, couldn’t you say that he was porgy with longish blonde hair and that he kept having to push his glasses back up on his nose?” I said, “Is that what you saw when you read he was oily?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Then why do I have to say it?” He said, “Hmm, point taken.” That series was read by tens of millions and if some saw this character the way my editor did and others saw him tall and skinny and without glasses, so much the better.
Now, for my main characters, if some readers imagine my pilot as Harrison Ford and others saw him as Sean Connery, fine. If some saw the flight attendant as Julia Roberts and others as Jennifer Aniston, who is at a
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 13
quibble? 2 adages to live by; don’t spoon feed your reader. Thinking reader first doesn’t mean to treat him like a baby, he wants to learn, to discover, to understand. Don’t do all his work for him. This fits with that self-editing chestnut that I always hammer home, resist the urge to explain. Here’s an example from a novel opening and it’s just one word that is explaining and doesn’t need to. See if you can catch it, “Careening unimpeded down the hill, Lee could barely keep up with her pedals.”
Okay, she’s on her bike, she’s riding down the hill and the writer says careening unimpeded, isn’t that redundant? Unimpeded is what careening implies so resist the urge to explain, less is more. Now, let’s talk about why this is so crucial, a writer wrote me recently and complained that she was struggling to get enough detail into her story to give her readers, “The same pictures I see in my head”. Now, at first blush, that might seem like a worthy goal, one we should all be striving for but I hope by now, you’ve already seen why this is a huge mistake. If you succeed in giving the reader the same pictures you see in your head, you could be doing the opposite of what I’m trying to teach you here. Rather than engaging your reader’s imagination, you may be crushing it. A lot of times writers will write to me or email me and ask for one Yodaesque bit of wisdom. They say, “Give me what you’d tell me if you could tell me only one thing.”
Here it is, avoid on-the-nose writing. Now, there’s no magic formula but if you get a handle on this amateur writing pitfall, you’ll instantly outpace 99% of your competition. Nothing kills the reader’s imagination quicker than on-the-nose writing. Now, let me define that if you haven’t heard that term before because I realize it might sound like something positive but onthe-nose is a term coined by Hollywood script writers for prose that mirrors real life without advancing your story. Have you ever written
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 14
something and showed it to somebody who loves you and it does this, it mirrors real life, they’ll be impressed and say, “Wow, you really go that, that is exactly how it happens.”
I’ve had that experience but this is one of the most common mistakes I see in otherwise good writing. No one chooses to write this way but even pros fall into it unaware. It has nothing to do with your ability to put together a sentence, a paragraph or even a scene, the amateur writer may even have a great idea, know how to build tension and have an ear for dialogue but onthe-nose writing distracts from the immersive story experience and stops the plot in its tracks.
While it seems like on-the-nose writing would be a good thing mirroring real life, if it doesn’t advance the story, it’s deadly. On-the-nose writing reads like this, “Paige’s phone chirped, telling her she had a call. She slid her bag off her shoulder, opened it, pulled out her cell, hit the Accept Call button, and put it to her ear. This is Paige,” she said. “Hey, Paige.” She recognized her fiancé’s voice. “Jim, darling! Hello?” “Where are you, Babe?” “Just got to the parking garage.” He says, “No more problems with the car then?” She says, “Oh, the guy at the gas station said he thinks it needs a wheel alignment.” Jim says, “Good. We still on for tonight?” “Looking forward to it, Sweetie.” He says, “Did you hear about Alyson?” She says, “No, what about her?” He says, “Cancer.” She says, “What?”
Now, here’s how that scene could be rendered, “Paige’s phone chirped. It was her fiancé, Jim, and he told her something about one of their best friends that made her forget where she was. “Cancer?” she whispered, barely able to speak. “I didn’t even know Alyson was sick. Did you?” Now, trust me, not one reader is going to wonder how she knew the caller was
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 15
Jim. We don’t need to be told that the chirp told her she had a call, duh, that her phone is in her purse, that her purse is over her shoulder, that she has to open it to get her phone, push a button to take the call, put the phone to her ear and to speak, identify herself to the caller, be informed who it is, you get the point and then go on about trivia.
The car and the day and the wheel alignment and … That doesn’t advance the story at all, it’s what really happens in real life. When I read it, you probably thought, “What’s wrong with that?” Listen to that first paragraph again, “Paige’s phone chirped, telling her she had a call.” Yeah, we get that. “She slid her bag off her shoulder, opened it, pulled out her cell, hit the Accept Call button and put it to her ear.” That’s what we do. As I say, you show that to your loving aunt or your parents or whatever and they’re going to go, “Wow, that’s exactly how it happens,” but it doesn’t move the story. Let’s just get to Paige’s phone chirp, it was her fiancé, Jim. Not one reader is going to wonder how she knew that caller was Jim. They’ll imagine all the other stuff. Now, if you’ve fallen into on-the-nose writing and we all have, don’t beat yourself up, it shows you have the ability to mirror real life, that’s nice, now, quit it. Leave that to the people who are fine with amateur writing. Something else you’ll want to avoid is throat clearing. Now, throat clearing is all the boring stuff that comes before the exciting stuff starts. I see this on too many manuscripts, that first page starts with scene setting or back story of philosophizing, it’s as if you want to write a novel the way you see a movie when they start with that long, wide shot that shows a city and then it shows a freeway and then it shows a neighborhood and then it shows a street and then it goes to the house and then it goes inside the house and we see the people. That’s something, an entirely different medium, motion picture medium is totally different. Your story needs to
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 16
start at a place that instantly sucks the reader in. Hit the ground running by arousing emotion and vivid imagery from the start, beginning your story at a point of action. That doesn’t mean your character has to be in life or death trouble depending on the genre.
If you’re reading a thriller, maybe you do have them hanging by their fingernails off a cliff but if you’re writing a cozy or a romance or any other kind, just make sure you’re arousing emotion, make your reader care about the character and vivid imagery from the start and that’s by triggering the theater of the reader’s mind with evocative single words.
David: Wow, and type of stuff Jerry and certainly some valuable cautions. Now, before you get into what we should be doing, let me break in here just to remind our attendees how to get your question answered during the question and answer session. Immediately following Jerry’s session, he’s going to be fielding questions about today’s material. Simply type your question into the box on your screen and our terrific producer, Matt will post your question on the screen for all attendees to view and read while Jerry gives his answer and insight. These question and answer sessions again are so crucial because not only can Jerry answer your personal question but you can also learn so much from listening to the issues and questions from other guild members. Make sure to stay tuned and be thinking of your questions.
All right Jerry, let’s keep moving with what we should be doing to engage the reader’s imagination.
Jerry: Okay, how to do this right. Make description part of the action, the narrative the story. Nothing stops a story dead in its tracks like a long
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 17
passage of description. If you’re poetically brilliant like Rick Bragg whose memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’” is my all-time favorite book. I would urge everybody to get that, it’s very modestly priced, you can get it anywhere. All Over but the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg or the aforementioned Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, if you can write like those guys, fine, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. The rest of us mere humans need to pull our readers into every scene without intruding and making them aware of our writing. Rather than stopping to change gears and trying to paint a word picture of the setting before describing what happens there. Make it part of the narrative flow. I tried to do this in Left Behind, one of my main characters, Buck Williams is desperate to get out of O’Hare Airport in Chicago in the midst of a disaster.
A young woman behind the counter at an airline club lounge tells him delivery companies have gotten together and moved their communication center out to a median strip near the Mannheim road interchange. Buck says, “Where is that?” “Just outside the airport, there’s not traffic coming in to the terminals anyway, total gridlock but if you can walk as far as that interchange, supposedly you’ll find all those guys with walkietalkies trying to get limos in and out from there.” Buck says, “I can imagine the prices.” She says, “No, you probably can’t.” He says, “Well I can imagine the wait.” She says, “Like standing in line for a rental car in Orlando.” Buck had never done that but he could imagine that too and she was right. After he had hiked with the crowd to the Mannheim interchange, he found a mob surrounding the dispatcher.
You see how I didn’t stop and describe that scene before getting into the dialogue and the action, I layered it in as part of the narrative. When she says, “There’s not traffic coming in to the terminals,” you can imagine a bit
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 18
terminal like that, total gridlock. “If you can walk as far as that interchange, you can see a guy walking next to a major highway.” You want to be part of the action, not stopping. I could have started by saying, “O’Hare airport looked like a mess, from the sky you could see the gridlock and you could see that limos were parked far away.” That all stops the action, let it happen in the story, in the narrative. You keep this storytelling secret in mind as you write, making description part of the action and you’ll pull your reader in like never before. There’ll be no slowing or stopping to set the scene first. Now, as I mentioned in the opening, we all know the joy of reading a book so full of vivid images that we’ll remember it for years, almost as if it were lavishly illustrated in vibrant color.
I read of a woman once who was thrilled to discover in her parents’ home, a volume she had cherished as a child. Eager to thumb through the beautiful 4 color painting she remembered so well, she discovered the book had no illustrations. The author had so engaged her, triggering the theater of her young mind that she herself had created those very real memories. Get this right and you do more than make your reader your partner and let him in on half the fun. You make him a repeat customer, it doesn’t get much better than that. You can avoid the pitfalls of writing on-the-nose and separate yourself from the competition by noticing the important stuff. Dig deep, go past the surface, mine your emotions, your mind, heart and soul. As in the anecdote from my on-the-nose advice, remember what it felt like when you got news like Paige did about someone you deeply care about.
Don’t distract with minutia, give your reader the adventure he signed up for when he chose to read your story. Take the reader with Paige and how she’ll respond to Jim then is she’ll say, “I need to call her, I’ve got to cancel my
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 19
meeting and I don’t know what to do about tonight.” That’s a story I’d keep reading, wouldn’t you?
David: Yep, absolutely, I would too. Let me just say, at this point, it does appear that we’re going to have lots of time for question and answer. As a reminder, keep thinking about your questions, type those into the box on your screen and we will start riffling through those as soon as Jerry is finished presenting the material. Okay, Jerry, how about some more ways to do this right, what else can we do to trigger the theater of our reader’s mind?
Jerry: Well, I can hardly emphasize enough how crucial it is that we stimulate our reader’s senses. I’m simply talking about those 5 senses we all learned about in grade school; sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The first 2, sight and hearing should be engaged in the reader by any book without the writer having to give them much thought. We’re telling a story and describing people, places and things, naturally, a reader sees these in his mind’s eye and when we write dialogue he imagines what that sounds like. You can enhance the engagement of these first 2 senses by being more creative in your descriptions and word choices. Be aware of one subtle caveat, an amateur mistake that clearly will separate you from the professionals in the eyes of an editor.
This is one of those insider bits of advice that well, it’s not original to me, it’s not something I’ve heard other writing coaches teach or even emphasize much. If you pick up just one important nugget from today’s session aside from our overall about engaging the theater of the reader’s mind, this is it. A glaring error I see too many beginners make is this, they forget that their perspective character for each scene if they’ve established them correctly,
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 20
serves as the reader’s camera, it’s all about point of view and perspective. You’re limited to that one camera based on which character’s point of view you’ve chosen to tell the story.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that means you’re in the 1st person limited to that character. You might be but this also holds true for when you’re writing in the 3rd person limited to that character. You know what 1st person sounds like, I’m speaking in the 1st person now but the most common voice in contemporary fiction with a few obvious exceptions is 3rd person limited which still makes use of a single point of view, one perspective character and you can have no more than one per scene, preferably per chapter, ideally per book.
Here’s an example of what I mean by 3rd person limited, limited to one perspective character per scene. “Cold wind whipped through the window and Riley woke with a start. She touched Dominic, asleep and snoring, safe for now. Riley sat in the dark, trying to remember her nightmare. A chill settled in her heart, she got up to close the window as parts of the dream came back.” Now that’s 3rd person limited with Riley as our camera. Now, I have another example for you here which illustrates the caveat I mentioned the subtle mistake. A writer has generously permitted me to use his work in progress to illustrate this in his novel. A fairy princess is his point of view character. Up to this point, we’ve experienced the whole story, written in the 3rd person, limited to her perspective. Now, that’s established in this paragraph, “The princess, the most beautiful fairy of all believed that if she could find the boy fairy she loved, she could kiss him back to life, she had heard of such things.”
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 21
That makes her our camera. Now, let me read to you just a few lines from later in the story to see if I can help you recognize the common mistake I’m talking about. “The fairy princess turned around and looked at her cracked pebble but it was no longer a pebble, she saw now that it had become an egg.” I’ll say it again, this is subtle but did you catch it? Because she’s our perspective character, our camera, we know she sees and hears and feels and tastes anything you describe. You don’t have to say that she looked or saw anything in order to describe it. In that paragraph I read you we can delete, “turned around and looked” or, “she saw now” and rather than saying, “The fairy princess turned around and looked at her cracked pebble but it was no longer a pebble, she saw now that it had become an egg.” We can simply say, “The princess’ cracked pebble was no longer a pebble, it had become an egg.”
See, we know she saw this because she’s our camera. I know that’s a little tricky to follow but you’ll see other examples of it in a lot of our guild training especially under the manuscript prepare and rewrite tab on the landing page. Check out some of those, you’ll see examples of this. Now, continuing on this subject of engaging the senses, Teresa Chase, a writer and executive producer says this, “Although novels are written in 2 dimensional black and white, the story actually happens in the realms of the reader’s mind. Multi-sensory books have become the most successful, capturing your reader’s imagination by helping him see, hear, smell, taste and feel every aspect of your story, draws him in and helps him experience the story through the characters.” Let’s talk about these one at a time. Sight involves more than what the characters see or don’t see.
Miss Chase points out that it involves subtle shades of color, shape dimension, distance. An author could write about a new green leaf or just as
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 22
easily write that, “As it unfurled, the heart shaped leaf contrasted with the darker, older foliage.” Giving details doesn’t necessarily mean a long string of adjectives or adverbs. Good writing is made up of powerful nouns and verbs. It does mean creatively describing something by showing rather than telling and again, always work description into the flow of the story, don’t make it a separate thing, that’s the surest way to bore a reader. Let’s move on to hearing, hearing is the most versatile sense. Sound or silence adds depth to your story. Remember that characters can hear beyond their immediate surroundings, the ability of sound to travel great distances allows you to add tension to a scene without disrupting the point of view.
Teresa Chase says, “A wolf howling somewhere in the night can be heard both inside and outside. The characters inside don’t have to see it to know it lurks somewhere nearby.” Remember, here again, you don’t have to have your point of view character “hearing” things or mention “the sound of” something. We’re in his point of view so you don’t have to say, “He heard a wolf outside.” Just say, “A wolf howled outside and Blake feared it was close.” If you say a wolf howled, we know your character heard it. All right, moving on to smell. The sense of smell is an incredibly effective way to activate memories and emotions. Smell is also one of the least employed senses by most writers. Even I find that I have to make a conscious effort to go back and inject this sense into my stories while crafting my final draft.
Lean on your experience and remember when an odor or fragrance immediately took you back to a meaningful episode in your life. In your story, could the smell of freshly baked bread remind your heroine of her beloved late aunt? Be careful not to discount the sense of smell and you shortchange your reader from getting a much more evocative experience. Again, you don’t have to have your point of view character smelling or
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 23
sniffing things, if an odor reminds her of something, we know she smelled or sniffed it. Okay, taste, the sense of taste is most personal and individual. What one person finds appealing, another might find repulsive. How a character responds to the taste of something and how he expresses himself can help define him. For instance, some people will go to any length to avoid showing their displeasure with the taste of something if they’re sitting at dinner with other people.
You can depict a character fighting a grimace and surreptitiously using her napkin to remove the offending bite from her mouth. That says a lot about her, she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, she doesn’t want to embarrass her host or hostess. By the same token her boyfriend might just spit his out and say, “Holy cow, what the heck was that?” That will reveal a lot about him too, won’t it? The horrified hostess might say, “I’m so sorry, was something not to your liking?” He can say, “Dang straight, that Pad Thai or whatever call it tastes like cow dung.” We learn a lot about him, don’t we? Here’s somebody that doesn’t care how other people feel, hasn’t learned manners, we learn an awful lot about the character by that. Let’s move on to touch. I find that touch is the most underused sense employed by beginning writers and sadly by pros as well. When it’s done correctly it can be powerful, can you evoke the unforgiving prickly feel of carpet on your cheek when you were a child?
Remember that, playing on the floor, you put your face down on the carpet and it’s stiff and prickly and … If you can evoke that, you’ll be miles ahead. Touch can also be as subtle as a caress or as violent as a punch in the mouth. The key is to make your reader feel what the character feels so he can’t be merely punched, he must feel that sharp pain when his lip is bashed into his teeth. While you’re at it, he can both taste and smell the
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 24
blood and feel the slippery sweat on his opponent’s arm as he tries to fend him off.
One more time, let me remind you that you don’t have to say the words touch or feel, have your character run her fingers across a rough plank and then instead of saying it felt like, simply write, “Protruding shards of pine snugged her fingers making her recoil to avoid a sliver.” Notice I didn’t use the words touch or feel or felt, I simply wrote, “She ran her fingers across the rough plank. Protruding shards of pine snugged her fingers making her recoil to avoid a sliver.”
Part of your research for your next story can simply be to touch the items that you plan to write about and then render that sense to your reader. Now, remember, it’s unusual for one sense to be used alone, combine them to have layers of images and sensations to your reader’s imagination. All right, let’s move on to making use of word pictures. Notice how word picture is itself a word picture. You want to find ways to express volumes in a single phrase or even a single word as John D. MacDonald did with knuckly in our earlier example. There’s a reason it’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Here, it works conversely, find words that paint pictures and they’ll make you a crisp writer who triggers thousands of images in the mind of your reader. Now, word pictures can be similes, these are like constructions as in, “They scurried away like mice.” Be sure to avoid clichés here though, if you write one you’ve seen or heard a thousand times, work at changing that to something original.
Metaphors differ from similes in that they don’t use the obvious comparison like but rather they’re figures of speech that are not literal but evoke a word picture like a broken heart or feeling blue. A perfect example
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 25
of this is Johnny Cash’s song about illicit love in which he sings, “I fell into a burning ring of fire.” Okay, I’m not going to audition for singing but you get the point. It’s not literal but it evokes a word picture. Personification is what we call it when we ascribe human characteristics to a thing, an idea or even an animal. We’re portraying these as if they act in human ways like, “The leaves danced in the breeze.” One of our masterclass guests, Donald Miller in his book, “A Million Miles and A Thousand Years”, wrote about forests of exclamation points. See how that’s personification? From Sweet Mercy by Ann Tatlock, she wrote, “A ripple of sorrow passed over her lips.”
From Dry as Rain by Gina Holmes, “She strutted ahead, stabbed the wooden stairs with her spiked heels and unlocked the front door.” Now, because of the proliferation of all sorts of visual media these days, it’s never been more important that we write visually. Everywhere you go, you see people seemingly addicted to screens, from the little one they carry in their pocket to the one on their desk top and from the big screen TV on their living room wall to gigantic screen in the multiplex theater. That’s what we’re competing with and unfortunately, just as in the days of the old radio dramas, what our reader is capable of producing in the theater of his mind is infinitely more creative than anyone could put on any of these other screens. Engage the theater of your reader’s mind and he will love you and keep coming back for more.
David: Wow, great material Jerry, you have certainly covered a lot of ground today and I’m certain that you have given our guild members something to think about and several tips to go apply immediately to their writing. Thank you for sharing this great content with us today. Okay, it is time for your questions, if you haven’t already, go ahead and type them into the box on your screen. Now, again, it’s your chance to get some personal
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 26
insight from Jerry so take advantage of this opportunity. I’ve actually had several people ask, Jerry, there’s been so much content that you’ve covered today, everybody is asking about getting access to the file, to the PowerPoint, to the audio, all of that. Let me just remind everybody that here’s how our process works internally. The recording of this will be uploaded inside the guild in about 48 hours. Watch for that, it should be in there no later than Monday afternoon. The PDF that Jerry referenced earlier does take a little bit longer for us to turn around, we get all of these transcribed and then we have to edit it, format it a little bit but then we will upload that to the guild as well so that you can have permanent access to that again. That’s part of your membership here in the Jerry Jenkins writer’s guild is getting access to all of this material as many times and as frequently as you want. Okay, Jerry, we’ve got tons of questions that are coming in so let’s get started if you’re ready. We’ve got about 40 minutes or so worth of question and answer time and our first question today comes from Sera.
Sera asks, “I’m working through self-editing my book and realizing I may have gone overboard, likely did go overboard in some of the description. How much does it take to trigger the theater of the reader’s mind?”
Jerry: Well, that’s a good question to ask yourself. When you’re reading, how much does it take to trigger the theater in your mind? As I’ve tried to say, less is more. When John D. MacDonald can describe a character as knuckly and I see him as the clerk in the hardware store when I was a teenager. We had a hardware store that we enjoyed frequenting and there was a guy there about 6 foot 4 and he had a protruding Adam’s apple and he had long, bonny fingers and he was thin and tall, it is the perfect description of him, knuckly. Notice what I saw from that one word. Now,
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 27
you may have seen something different, you might have seen a guy with big, sausage like fingers with gigantic knuckles and big, fat hands, that’s fine. Remind yourself of this when you’re self-editing your book. Anytime you can work whatever description there is into the story itself rather than saying, “Here’s what the house looked like, it’s set on an acreage of this and that and winds blew in off the lake and etcetera.”
Have that stuff happen while things are happening in the story. When they pull up to this house, they see the wide, expansive lawn and when they go in, the hostess is shutting windows because the wind is blowing in. Make it part of it so that the reader isn’t saying, “Okay, here we go, a bunch of description and then I’ll get back to the story.” That might help you trim some of that.
David: Okay, terrific question and now let’s go the opposite direction. Elizabeth writes in, “Is there a way to do too little description? I find myself only including description if it means something to the action of the scene.” It would usually then come up in dialogue. I realized in my full length novel, there is almost no description.”
Jerry: It’s difficult to do too little as long as what you do have there is evoking these images in the reader’s mind. Now, if it literally is all dialogue or you just say, “She went and saw her friend Susie,” and you don’t tell whether she’s older or younger or whether she’s cute or whether she’s tall, whatever, there needs to be something there to give them a clue. You don’t have to … The amateur thing to do is to say, “Susie was 2 years younger than I, we met in college and she had bobbed hair and she always wore high heels even though she was tiny and she …” To tell what she wears, to tell the color of her eyes, we don’t need all that. Describe her, is she bubbly, is she
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 28
older? Like I say, 1 or 2 words, give the reader enough so they can provide their own description. If it’s too sparse, you’ll have a feeling for that and I’d say, in your next run through, just go back in and add a few things and make sure they’re part of the narrative, part of the flow, part of the plot, not separate.
David: That’s great, Elizabeth, thanks for the question, glad you’re here. Okay, next question is from Lorna, this comes in, let’s see, she says, “Jerry, can you please give another example of writing about smell?”
Jerry: Yeah. Trying to come up with an example off the top of my head. There are really smells everywhere and as I mentioned, this is one of the least employed and it’s true of me too, I have to think about it. As I read a scene, I try to think, “Is there anything in this scene that my character might smell?” If they live on the beach, they live on the ocean, they’re going to smell salt air but you don’t need to use the word smell because they’re your camera, we know if you describe it, they’ve smelled it. You can refer to the stinging salt air and you realize your characters are smelling it because it’s there. I remember one time my wife and I visited Jakarta, Indonesia. This has been many years ago now so maybe it’s different but back then, there was an incredible cornucopia of smells there. We smelled manure, we smelled things cooking on the street and these kiosks where they sell corn that they cook right there, some pita bread, that type of thing. We smelled diesel because all the cars ran on diesel and smoggy. Imagine those smells all working together, you just mention those and it evokes something in the reader and reminds them of some place they have been like that.
David: That’s great. I’m thinking of so many different things right now, so many different memories. You’re right, that’s a great example, Lorna, great
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 29
question, glad you’re here. Next, we go to Peter asks, “I tend to skip descriptions when I read therefore I use very little description when I write, is that okay?”
Jerry: Yeah, I think it’s a good lesson because we want to write stuff that we would read and if you’re going to skip reading it, you ought to skip writing it. I think probably what’s wrong with those descriptions that you’re skipping is they’re doing just what I say, they’re separate from the action. Someone has taken a paragraph or 2 or sometimes a page to try to set the scene and just the cottage setup on a cliff overlooking the ocean and this and that and you go, “Oh brother, I got it.” Do that as part of your story and then people can’t skip it because it’s in dialogue or it’s in the narrative. As I said in the other example, somebody goes or they pull up and they can’t wait to get out of the car and peer over the edge of the cliff because how do they protect kids. They can’t let kids play in the backyard because there’s no rail or anything to keep them from falling into the ocean. As they talk and as wind hits them and they pull their coats tighter, you get the impression of what the weather is like. Again, layer it in there, make it part of the narrative and then your reader can’t skip it.
David: Great question Peter, thanks for asking that. Next is a question from Anne Coker. Anne is a great guild member, glad she’s with us again today. She says, “In non-fiction, personal experience and memoir, the main character would be the writer or family members. How does this writer apply the less is more and yet ignite the imagination of the reader?”
Jerry: It’s by giving him just enough and in the memoir especially, you’re writing about your own life but you’re doing it theme oriented, that’s why it’s not an autobiography. You’re not saying, “I was born here, raised here,
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 30
here’s my old school experience till I got married and then had a family etcetera.” You’re picking episodes out of your life to support your theme and your theme may be the grace of God or the goodness of God or maybe how you overcame struggles and there are 7 major ones you want to talk about from when you were 6 then when you were 21 and one when you were 44. You’re telling those stories but you’re doing it just like a novelist. You can say, “As I sat in the rec. room and heard the argument in the next room …” Then you can start using just little touches of what the carpet felt like on your bare legs as you sat there on the floor or what you smelled from the kitchen, just hints. “The sizzling sound from the kitchen and the smell of bacon reminded me that we were going to have a good breakfast but now I’m worried about what they’re arguing about.” Little hints within the narrative and it will ignite the imagination in the reader for sure.
David: Great, thanks Anne for that question. Next is something from Becky, Becky asks, “Can these principles be applied to nonfiction writing as well?”
Jerry: Yeah and I should have made that point. Just like I just mentioned with the memoir, I think they can all be used the same way because people love stories. Now, when you’re doing a non-fiction book and you’re trying to make a point, you might be teaching, you might be outlying certain points, those are good and necessary, they have to be there but any time you can add an anecdote to prove your point or support your point, it should read like fiction even though the people know it’s true. One of my most recent books is called The Matheny Manifesto and it’s the old school ideas of team work and hard work and all of that good stuff from the Manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. His theme is, “We ought to do it the way I was taught as a kid and when we do that, we succeed, we win, things are better.”
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 31
Throughout, I kept asking him, I would say, “Tell me about when you learned this?” He was talking about how a little league player gets upset when he doesn’t get much playing time, he thought he was the best player. I say, “Has that ever happened to you?” He says, “Yes.” He told me this story about how a bigger, older kid joined their team and took his job as catcher. This guy wanted to be a major league catcher and now he’s a manager so you know he’s a fantastic athlete.
It drove him crazy to be 2nd string and he talked about riding home in the car with his parents and knowing that his father was the one who taught him a lot of this sportsmanship and the coach has the right to be wrong even if you disagree with him, you do what he says. So he’s fighting to not say anything but he’s boiling because they’ve traveled 50 miles to this game and he didn’t even get to play. He said something about, “I can’t believe that he isn’t playing me, I don’t think …” Then the silence from his parents where he said … This is where you use sound, silence.
He would almost love for his dad to say, “Knock it off, you know better than to talk like that.” He just didn’t respond at all. That inappropriate comment’s hanging in the air and Matheny is thinking, “I know, I know, it’s right and I’m just going to have to play harder and be better and my time will come.” It did. That’s how you use fiction techniques in non-fiction and all this stuff, you still need to evoke the imagination and trigger the theater of the reader’s mind. You want them to see it, hear it, taste it, smell it. Definitely I would say these are transferable.
David: Speaking of hearing it Jerry, I think we all enjoyed your little Johnny Cash rendition.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 32
Jerry: I debated that, I didn’t do that in the rehearsal as you recall. David: That’s what surprised me, I thought it was great. I look forward to hearing more of that.
Jerry: Don’t count on it.
David: Okay, let’s see, excuse me. Next question is from John, he says, “should we use words that perhaps a reader has never heard? If it seems the best word to use, should we use it, example conundrum, fortuitous, petulant?”
Jerry: Yeah. I think there is a place for those sometimes and my only word of warning there is, when you do, make sure it’s in a context where they will know immediately what it means. If they go, “Whoa, what is that, I’ve got to look that up, I’ve got to get a dictionary out.” That’s going to stop your story. Cormac McCarthy, I forgot the right name who writes all these book of the year, The Road and No Country for Old Men, he makes up words. You look them up, you won’t find them but you know what they mean because they’re so evocative in context. I would say, if you’re going to use that, if you use conundrum, you might use it in a sentence that talks about somebody facing a conundrum and being so frustrated that they couldn’t figure it out and people go, “That’s what a conundrum is.” Or, “It was fortuitous that this happened,” because you’re writing an anecdote about a surprise or something that happened just in time to make things work, it makes fortuitous understood even if people haven’t heard it before or used it before.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 33
Keep that in mind, make sure that the word doesn’t jump out and make people go, “Oh brother, I don’t know what he’s talking about.” Then they’ll stop, you don’t want them to stop, you want them to get it.
David: Great question John, thanks for asking that. Next is a question from Charlene, she says, “How much information is okay or not okay to give in an introduction or forward?”
Jerry: Well you know, it’s interesting because introductions and forwards are actually becoming per se. Now, a forward is something that somebody else writes for your book about you or about the book and why people should read it. I would say don’t let them give the story away and you don’t see forwards in novels, a forward is for a non-fiction book and it’s usually a famous person, somebody that, they, “Dr. Phil liked this, I’ll like it too.” In an introduction, if you’re talking about fiction, you’re probably talking about a prologue, something that happened in the past or sets the book. I would say still write it the same way that you’re writing everything else or you’re evoking, less is more and you’re evoking the reader’s imagination. Again, I’d say you provide only enough information that it meets the need of why you’re doing a prologue. One of the things I try to do although my publishing company didn’t let me do it this last time for some reason, I didn’t even notice till it was published. In “The Valley of the Dry Bones”, my latest novel, I did a prologue but I didn’t title it prologue because I didn’t want people to skip it, they tend to sometimes skip those. Usually, I try not to label them and then they read it and then they get 4, 5 pages and they turn and it says chapter 1 and they go, “That wasn’t even chapter 1 yet but I needed that information.” My publishing company or the editor put prologue on there and it doesn’t hurt anything but you just want to avoid anybody skipping so let’s keep that in mind.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 34
David: All right, thanks Charlene, good question. Next is from Richard, he says, “In Truman Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, the first several pages I guess are very descriptive and I couldn’t put it down. Is that a good beginning even though it is very descriptive?
Jerry: Yeah and here’s another one of those masters I could have put in the same category with Bragg or Charles Frazier. Capote was a genius, in fact, before Rick Bragg I thought Capote was our greatest American writer forgetting his extracurricular activities and lifestyle and all that. He was a genius, he had the highest IQ I think ever recorded in the United States. There’s some talk about it being over 200 or some crazy thing. When he researched that book and of course it’s a non-fiction book about a mass murder, he interviewed people over a period of 6 months without taking notes and without recording it and then he writes this book with all this details and specifics. Not one person he interviewed said, “You forgot that or you missed that or that isn’t what I said.” Everybody said he got it exactly and they also said that when he was interviewing them, they were thinking, “Is he going to remember this because he’s not writing it down or he’s not recording me.”
He’s brilliant and he’s such a great writer. He was able to evoke as you say the description and the images. I wish I had a copy of it right in front of me because it’s so subtle the way he does it. He mentions little details and you’re not really aware of the writer, you’re sucked into the story. In fact, I was a teenager when that book came out and people knew I wanted to be a writer and they said, “You need to read that.” I started reading it for the purpose of seeing what kinds of terms or phrases or fancy words or constructions he uses and the first page or 2 I’m thinking, “I don’t see any of that I just feel like I’m there as you said.” Then I was probably 40 or 50 pages into it and
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 35
my mother called me for dinner. It shook me, this has never happened to me before, I was unaware I was reading and turning pages. I was so into the story, I was just there and it shocked me into consciousness and realized that’s the genius.
Capote knew how to get out of the way of his content, he wasn’t showing off his vocabulary, he wasn’t showing off his writing, he just used these little, evocative words and phrases to make you feel like you were there.
David: That’s great, that’s a great picture, speaking of theater of the reader’s mind, as you’re saying that Jerry, I’m picturing you reading that book and humming Johnny Cash songs.
Jerry: Exactly.
David: All right, thanks John, good question. Next, we go to Arlene, she says, “Does this all apply to YA children’s books?”
Jerry: Not quite as much, that’s an excellent point to make. The younger kids are, the more they need a little more telling that you’re still showing but you’re giving them more words. Now, YA is a pretty young adult has quite a wide range and the biggest mistake people make there is they forget that kids like to read up. If they’re 9, they like to read books about 12 and 13 year olds, if they’re 13 and 14 year olds, they like to read books about college people. They want to read up and say, “This is what I want be like, I want to be a senior in high school or a college kid or young and married or whatever. Remember that but the younger you’re writing for, the probably a little bit more description you need because they want to think about it and see these things in their mind and it could be that a word or 2 doesn’t evoke that.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 36
The reason these words work, like knuckly, a kid might take that literally and go, “What’s he talking about, knuckly, is it just made of knuckles?” To an adult, because of our years of experience, you say knuckly and I think of a person. I can see him in my mind because that guy … It just makes sense to me because of my years on this earth. You have to keep that in mind when you’re writing to kids.
David: All right, thanks Arlene, that’s a good clarification point, great question. Next, we go to a question from Olivia, she says, “I’ve had a reader tell me, “I want more description.” Am I right in thinking it was the right description she wanted, not more?”
Jerry: Yeah, probably and because she’s a reader and not a writer, she might not use exactly the right terminology. Some people just love … Every once in a while you find somebody that says, “I just love description, I’ll sit there and read a page or 2 of where the house was located and what the weather was like and what the trees were like and the sun coming through and all that.” I have to say they’re rare but there are writers out there for them, there are people that write like that. It just puts me to sleep and I want to get to the story and I think that’s where most readers are. If only one reader tells you that, you probably want to say, “Here’s a book you might like by somebody else.” If everybody is saying that, if everybody reads it and says it’s too sparse, I’m not getting … I can’t see it in my mind then you want to add more description. As you say, you want it to be the right description, not just pages of descriptions of things.
You want to do it in the narrative, in the dialogue and use as few as words as possible to evoke that image in the reader’s mind.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 37
David: Thanks Olivia, good question. Jerry, we’ve had a couple of people ask for you to expand a little bit more on the Rick Bragg book that you said is your favorite of all time.
Jerry: Yeah, I love to refer to that book. Rick Bragg was a New York Times columnist and he’s from the Deep South, he was raised by a single mother, he and his 2 brothers and she was really a heroine of this memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’. His father was an alcoholic and abusive and the mother had to protect the kids and raise them on her own basically. His writing is so evocative as a non-fiction writer and he does break a lot of rules. He writes long paragraphs and he uses lots of description. It’s so good that as I say, if you can do that, I don’t have any qualms because it’s just that great. I would recommend it to anybody, I’m looking on my shelf right now to see if I’ve got one so I can read you a paragraph out of it. Yes I do, there it is. Just listen to this first paragraph of the first chapter and it’s a long one, in fact, I won’t even read the whole paragraph but just enough so you get the picture. The chapter is called A Man Who Buys Books Because They’re Pretty. I won’t get far enough to tell what that story means but here’s a part of the first paragraph, “My mother and father were born in the most beautiful place on earth, in the foot hills of the Appalachians along the Alabama-Georgia line. It was a place where grey mists hid the tops of low, deep green mountains, where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls.
Where old women in in bonnets dipped Bruton snuff and hummed “Faded Love and Winter Roses” as they shelled purple hulls, canned peaches and made biscuits too good for this world. It was a place where playing the church piano loud was near as important as playing it right, where fearless young men steered long black Buicks loaded with yellow whiskey down roads the
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 38
color of dried blood and where the first frost meant hog killin’ time and the mouthwatering smell of cracklin’s would drift for acres from giant, bubbling pots.” Isn’t that just incredible? I can read that and I often do, I’ll read that paragraph once a week, I’ll read it before I start to write and the whole book is that way. I’m reading this guy’s memoir and I’m stopping my wife as she walks through saying, “Listen to this paragraph.”
Most people say, “I don’t want to read the paragraph twice, if I can’t understand it or whatever, I put it down.” These aren’t because I can’t understand, it’s just poetic. As I say, it breaks a lot of rules, you heard how long that one sentence was and this is part of a long paragraph, it hasn’t ended yet. If you’re a writer you ought to be reading Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’.
David: That’s great. Always enjoy hearing some more behind the scenes personal things that you enjoy and things that you go to for inspiration and things that are helping to create your future stories, that’s great.
Jerry: I should add, I was so taken by the book that I wrote about a 3- page fan letter, single spaced and then I thought, “Now where am I going to send this, how do I get to him?” I called the New York Times and I said, “I’m trying to find Rick Bragg, where to send him a letter.” They said, “Well now he’s running our Atlanta bureau now so you might have to call there.” I called the Atlanta bureau and this guy answers the phone and I say, “I’m trying to find Rick Bragg.” He says, “Speaking.” I just about fell out of my chair, I just immediately turned into a groupie and I said, “I just read your book and it’s fantastic and …” He told me where to send the letter and he was honored that I liked it and all that.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 39
Then I met him on an author tour one time, we happened to be show up at the same book fair or something and so I reminded him of that and talked to him about it and then we wound up on the same plane flying to the next place. It was just a thrill to meet him and sometime, I’m going to get him as a masterclass guest. We’ve been close a few times, David but we’ll get him one of these times and it’s going to be a highlight for people.
David: Absolutely, we’re working hard on that as with several other authors and friends of yours so stay tuned guild members, we’ve got some exciting things coming up in that regard. All right, let’s keep going, we’ve got about 15 minutes or so left so let’s get to as many questions as possible. The next one is from Gina, she says, “What is the best way to mark time in a story?”
Jerry: There are lots of different ways. The best way is what works in your situation. If it’s a novel, you can use what’s called time tags which is before the first paragraph of a chapter or a section where you’ve switched time. You just make it flush left and italics and you might say, “3 years later,” or you might give a date. Maybe the first part took place when you were a child and maybe you’re a child of the ‘70s and then you say, “March of 1983.” The reader goes, “Wow, okay, we’ve jumped ahead now.” Now, she’s an adult or a teenager or whatever it makes you and go from there. That eliminates you from having to do this as pros where you don’t have to say, “15 years later, when I became a teenager …” You just put that date there and you’ve got it and then you go on with your story. Any time you mark time, especially progression or you’ve skipped something, you want to also skip space between your paragraphs.
Paragraphs don’t have spaces between them in real books and so if you leaf through one you’ll see that. You add a space and maybe even a typographical
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 40
dingbat like 3 asterisks in the middle and then your next paragraph should tell us why there is that break. It should say, I thought of that incident 14 years later when I applied for college of whatever it is. That’s the way to do it and there are all kinds of different ways to do it but you want to pick the one that works the best for your story, doesn’t stop the action or make the reader aware that you’ve done anything fancy, just take them from one time to the next.
David: Thanks Gina, great question, let’s keep going. We’ve got one from Donna, she says, “I used to enjoy Grace Livingstone Hill’s books but now they feel so slow and the writing feels heavy. What has happened that this type of writing seems out of style?”
Jerry: Yeah, it got slow and the writing feels heavy. It’s really a matter of age and again this thing I talked about, we’re in the screen generation now, we want instant gratification. That doesn’t mean we only write one word sentences or just one word descriptions although as I pointed out, some of those can be effective. We need to keep things moving and I said, the reader is not your enemy but sometimes you have to think of the reader as restless almost to the point of hostility. Now, they’re not mad at you, they picked up your book … When I was a magazine editor, I thought about this that we spend so much time on the front cover and every graphic and every layout and editing and all that stuff.
Then we would go and watch people pick our magazine off the rack and the first thing they’d do, they’d look at the cover, they got it in their left hand then they’d turn it. They’re looking at the back cover because they were mostly right handed, they start leafing through it from the back with their thumb. They only stop on articles if they see a picture or a subhead or a
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 41
heading or an author’s name that the like, otherwise, they’re like, “I don’t have time for this, I’m moving on. Stop me if you can, give me something that’s good or I’ll put this thing back in that shelf and not buy it or if I buy it, I’m going to go just to this article. We need to think that way as novelists too, people just aren’t of the same ilk they were when Grace Livingstone Hill was writing. I don’t remember how long ago her stuff … I used to publish her because I was publisher of media press and we had a lot of her old titles.
But it seems to me like they were previous century and so there wasn’t TV, there wasn’t computers, there wasn’t … Entertainment was, you sit down with a Grace Livingston Hill book and if it can distract you from your life for 3 or 4 hours or a few days, that’s great and people liked it. Now they’re like, “I want to read that novel but when am I going to have time?” When you sit down to read … I just read the first line of a new novel by an old thriller writer who also teaches. This guy is not educated, he’s been in prison, he’s got tattoos, he looks like an old biker and he teaches writing. I’m looking at his stuff and I say, “I agree with almost everything he says so I grab one of his books and the first sentences says, “He was so mean that wherever he went became the bad part of town.” Now, I’m still reading, I got … Who could put that down? That is beautiful, evocative writing.
Grace Livingstone Hill would have started with 3 or 4 pages of describing a mansion or a forest or something like that. It’s just a matter of the times we live in, people force you to do your best to grab their attention.
David: Thanks Donna for that question, thanks for participating. Next question is from Timothy, he says kind of in that same vain, “Jerry, does genre affect the level of description, fantasy and science fiction create new
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 42
worlds, people and things for readers. Would these genres need more description to bring the story to life?”
Jerry: Yeah, they probably would especially futuristic or as you say fantasy science fiction. You want to tell what things are like but again, the most evocative. Rather than stand back and say, “Here’s what the city of the future looked like in outer space or on this mountain or wherever, in this valley.” Do it in the story, have a character fly there in a rocket ship, whatever it is, gets out, they take him in and as he’s going in, he’s never seen a building made entirely of aluminum or 150 stories high and then tell her what kind of security it took to get in the door and what his boots sounded like on the floor because of what they were made of. It’s all part of the action, if you just stop and describe the whole thing. You’ll have certain fans who like that and it’s okay and if you can do it well, you’re probably okay and it does take a little more than the normal novel, you write about that. Again, if you can layer it in as part of the narrative and part of the plot, it will be even more effective.
David: All right, let’s keep going, we’ve got a question from Peter next, he says, “How do you see that your book Riven evokes the theater of the reader’s mind?”
Jerry: Well, I’d have to go back and take a peek at it and as you may know I consider that my magnum opus, it’s my favorite thing of everything I’ve done. I hope I’m doing what I said here, I’d have to look at each page and see it. One thing is, I don’t recall describing my main character, either one of them as far as in very specific detail. I say enough about them that you get the picture. The guy who goes from being a small church pastor that everybody reminds him he’s not Billy Graham becomes the chaplain in this story, chaplain in a prison. Because of the way I talk about him and say things about
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 43
him and his daughter who is estranged from him, she’s a lawyer and she talks about how despite how boring he looks or dresses or even speaks, it offends her when people keep reminding him he’s not Billy Graham and he’s no big deal.
He’s so nice and selfless and giving and she thinks that’s even weak on his part, he should stand up to these people and they even took action because his daughter was estranged. They said, “You’re not qualified to be our pastor because your daughter is off in the world doing this and that.” You get a picture of the guy as someone who would wear the absolute most modest clothing that a small church pastor would wear. He wouldn’t be colorful, he wouldn’t be … I might have said he was balding or … Just a normal plain guy. Then the other character is the guy who’s on death row for murder is a young kid who comes from a trailer park. In my mind’s eye, I can see him with his long hair greased back like they did in the ‘60s and wearing all black and high heel shoes for guys with pointed toes, just enough to give the reader a picture of who those people are without saying he had hazel eyes and he had cross feet and his teeth were this or that.
Again, I don’t have it in front of me so I can’t say for sure but that’s how I try to evoke the theater of the reader’s mind, I was giving him just enough.
David: Peter, thanks for that question and Jerry, so many people have heard you talk about Riven several times. If you haven’t read that book yet, guild members certainly take the time, certainly one of my favorites. That was powerful.
Jerry: It is my longest so if you don’t like it, it serves as a good doorstep so you can’t lose.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 44
David: It’s a thick book for sure. All right, next we go to a specific question about something Frank is writing. He says, “How do you paint a picture of the stadium atmosphere during a sports match with tension, suspense etcetera while describing the match? Actually, it is the crowd that feels the suspense intention and thus creates the atmosphere. Both the spectators and the players have to be described, how do I keep my nose out of this?”
Jerry: Paint a picture of a stadium atmosphere, well, one thing you’ve got going for you is that almost every reader has been there. That’s similar to that situation I talked about with Jim and Paige talking on the phone. You can talk about the den of the crowd and how even though there were 40 or 50 thousand more people there, all totally into the game and screaming and etcetera, your character has some self-thought, self-doubt, inner dialogue going on. We’ve all felt that, you’re in a place where you’re 1 of 50,000 but you feel alone. You hear all that noise but you don’t know anybody, maybe it’s just the people you’re with and you’re thinking, “This is the best game I’ve ever seen, has it ever happened before that they did … Bases are loaded with 2 outs in the 8th and they can have a chance to go …”
You describe that stuff but also, that’s a perfect place to use sense of smell. What does a big league ball park smell like? If it’s a football game, it’s in the winter so that will a little different but like a baseball game, you’re going to smell beer, you’re going to smell body odor, you’re going to smell peanuts. Depending on where you go, if you’re walking behind stands into the concession area, the bathrooms don’t smell too good either. All those things evoke pictures in the reader’s mind. Again, less is more but I agree with you that … You don’t want to necessarily …. For instance, if you were describing a 2nd baseman who’s a rookie and he’s in a big game like this and it’s the World Series or whatever. You can say a lot about him but whether he wants
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 45
the ball to be hit to him right then or he’d rather not. Maybe the inner dialogue is most evocative if he’s saying, “If the ball goes to short step I’ve got to cover 2nd, we’ve got to get this double play, I’ve got to think foot on the bag, miss the runners.”
You don’t need to say, “His heart was racing and he was scared and he would …” Because the reader will know that. You describe the situation well enough, the reader ought to be feeling that, the reader ought to have his heart pounding for this kid who is trying to remember everything and doesn’t want to make a mistake that screws up the game. That’s how less is more, describe the situation and you don’t have to say, because I see this in almost every manuscript I read, “His heart was beating out of his chest or heart was racing or short of breath or sweating or shivering.” Tell what the situation is, the reader knows how that guy is going to feel.
David: Outstanding question Frank, I love when people are asking where they’re at, what they’re specifically struggling with in their writing process and how today’s content has applied to that. Great question Frank, thanks for being here. Next, let’s go to Marie, she says, “Jerry, are there any takeaways from Ayn Rand’s books or Atlas Shrugged in particular. I love that book, not it’s religious philosophy but so many good things in there. What should we notice in it?”
Jerry: It’s been so long since I’ve read Atlas Shrugged that it would be hard for me to speak specifically but my recollection is that it’s very evocative. You see these people, you hear them, you get who they are. I don’t remember she’d used the less is more feeling and you just reveled to paint her on picture if she actually described the characters in detail. Because of how old it is, she may have and so I’d have to review it to tell you if there’s really good
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 46
takeaway. The fact that it became such a bestseller is partly because of its philosophy, people jumped on it. It also had to be good fiction writing or it wouldn’t have worked. If it’s just a message book, they usually don’t succeed unless they’re also written well so I’d take a look and try to see how she treated description. Maybe there is some takeaway there for you.
David: All right, next question as we start to wrap up here, almost out of time, Jackie Rodriguez asks, “Jerry, do you have a book on this subject?”
Jerry: I think I just wrote one today. We could put this in paperback and sell it in the spring. I don’t, there are books about description, you can google that at Writer’s Digest books. There are some great stuff out there but I don’t personally have a book on this. We’ve talked about all the classes and training and stuff and how we might put some of those together in a format that will be easy for you to leaf through but at this point I don’t, no.
David: Got you. Well, Jerry, we are almost out of time but let’s go to, let’s see, the guys don’t have this one but I’m going to ask a question that Michael Sayer asked very early on and just say does this … He asks, “Does this topic apply to any stage of the writing process?”
Jerry: I think it does although as I admitted, a lot of times, when I’m getting my first draft down, I’m not thinking about the senses, sometimes I’m not thinking about less is more, sometimes I’m not even thinking about making sure my description is part of the action. As you know, the way I’ve often talked about how I work, I read a certain number of pages per day and then the next day, the first thing I do is a heavy edit and re-write of those. At that stage I’m cleaning up redundancies and incongruities and trying to make sure that all works. Then when I’m done with entire book, I go back from the
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 47
beginning and do that again. That’s actually my 3rd draft and it’s there because I’ve cleaned it up every day that it’s pretty tight. There I’ll say, “Okay, I worked my description, I got that out of there probably in that 2nd draft and made it part of the narrative.” Then I say, “All right, have I engaged the reader’s senses?”
I did several pages of a scene where people met at a café in the middle of nowhere. Did I mention any smells, did they feel grit on the floor or maybe even on the table was still sticky when the waitress hadn’t wiped it off well enough from the previous person. That’s when I need to remind myself, if I haven’t done it naturally in my first draft because I’m just trying to get story done, I make sure I at least do it on the final draft and say, “Here’s a place where I could just …” you don’t try to shoe horn it in so it looks funny but do it right as part of the narrative.
“As they sat down in the café and he slid into the booth, he felt a bulge next to his left hip and he looked down and somebody had left a sweater there. He had …” It isn’t so much that it’s part of the story that he has to give this sweater to the waitress to take it, it’s just that kind of place. If the floor is dirty, he’s hoping the food isn’t dirty but you want to get those senses in there so the people can really feel like they’re there.
David: All right. Well, we’re starting to wrap up here but we’ve had a couple of people ask if you’re willing to tell us anything about the 190th book that you’re working on right now.
Jerry: Yeah, it’s interesting that I mentioned the Mike Matheny book, The Matheny Manifesto. That’s a motivational book about how to do it right, it’s his old school views of life and success and sports and it’s for adults. If you’re
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 48
a coach or a parent or whatever, it’s for how to do this right and not let kids be egotists and bad teammates and etcetera. People have loved it and it’s been a bestseller and they’ve even put off the paperback until next spring because the hardback is still selling so well. Well, Mike wants to reach kids with this same message.
In our discussion about it, I said, “Mike, kids won’t read this essay style that adults do, they want to … Adults look at it and go, “Here’s 3 ways to be a better parent or better coach or do better practices or whatever,” and they like that. Kids won’t respond to that.” I said, “How about we invent a little league team with a player who becomes our main character, a coach who doesn’t know how to do it right, he’s yelling at the kids, it’s all about winning, it’s not about teamwork and he’s even unethical. Then somehow he learns seizure principles and we want to say him specifically because it’s fiction but he gets how to do it right and everything turns. Then we can get a lot of action and a lot of sports, a lot of fun.” Mike loved that idea and so that’s our next project is writing middle grade fiction based on the Matheny Manifesto.
I have to say, this is a little of the subject but to his credit. A lot of the people I write with, famous athletes and people like that, I do all the writing, they have full veto power over every word but I do the writing because that’s my gift and then they check it over. Once it comes out and becomes successful, sometimes those people forget that they didn’t write it, it’s just convenient to say, “When I was writing this book …” Mike is not that way at all, totally selfless and he said, “If we do this, I know you want my name on there as the author and you as the writer but I’m not a fiction writer and I don’t’ want to pretend to be.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 49
How about if it’s Mike Matheny presents Jerry Jenkins fiction?” Now that’s a really selfless thing to do and it just shows that he lives up to his own principles. I just wanted to share that because he’s that impressive of a guy but that’s the next project, that’s the 190th book will be the first book and probably a trilogy for middle grade kids about how to do it right when you’re playing little league ball.
David: That’s great. All right Jerry, that’s all the time we have for today, we actually went a few minutes over but some outstanding questions from our guild members. I think we got over 20 questions today so terrific time. Thank you for your insight, for those of you who did not get your question answered, we are going to provide a way to make sure that everybody gets at least 1 question answered from Jerry. We’re actually going to do it slightly different this time, we’re going to be able to send you and intercom message, anybody who’s been a part of the guild, you’ve seen the little intercom app, that’s how we communicate and that’s how we send a lot of messages. It typically can show up just in your email so just watch for a message from us on how to ask Jerry your question and we’ll make sure that everybody gets at least one question answered from Jerry at some point over the next several days. We’re interrupting him during family time right now, as you saw earlier, he’s got some family in town right now but we’ll make sure that everybody gets their question asked. Okay Jerry, as we wrap up, any final comments?
Jerry: Well, I just want to thank you David as usual for a great job hosting and Matt who works behind the scenes and did this slide deck today, I think you all agree that those are the best we have ever had and really look great. Thanks everybody for your help and thanks for the attendees for being with us.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 50
David: Absolutely, stay tuned for more exciting announcements from the Jerry Jenkins Writer’s Guild, some great content and material coming your way very soon, thanks for taking time out of your Saturday to join us and have a great day. This has been a live workshop with Jerry Jenkins on the Jerry Jenkins Writers Guild, thanks.
To watch or listen to the session, click here.
THE JERRY JENKINS WRITERS GUILD: WORKSHOP #7 UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT 51