“[O]nce you’ve written one thing, then everything else is possible.” —Richard Z. Santos
On Wednesday, April 8, Richard Z. Santos will teach “Fusing The Protagonist’s Internal and External Journey.” In this class, students will learn how to ensure their characters change and are changed by the events of their story, do writing exercises designed to think about the depth of characters and plot, and discuss how writers balance these elements in the drafting process. Join us in this exploration of the internal and external, plot and heart!
Richard Z. Santos’ debut novel, Trust Me, was a finalist for the Writer’s League of Texas Book Awards and was named one of the best debuts of the year by Crime Reads. He’s the editor of the anthology A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories. His fiction has been nominated for The Pushcart, Best of the Net, the International Thriller Writers Awards, and has been cited in The Best American Mystery and Suspense. His stories, nonfiction, and essays have appeared in Texas Monthly, The Rumpus, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Like the Wind, Austin Noir, Lone Stars Rising, and more.
Here’s what Richard had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
I was definitely one of those kids who found Stephen King at a young age, and he was very important to me—same with Ray Bradbury, the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. And then, around thirteen years old or so, Clive Barker really blew me away. Finding his books felt like leveling up in a lot of ways. The darkness, the imagination, the sexuality, the fear, it all felt heightened in Barker’s books, and it felt like finding an outsider who was able to write for and to me.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
My biggest challenge, which I think all writers confront at some point, is realizing how much time it takes to get a piece where you want it. The first draft of something might come out easily, but chances are you’ll need rounds of revision and editing after that. This is true for short stories but for novels it’s potentially a never-ending process. For me, my novels never end up looking like how I thought they’d look. This means changing the structure, reworking the plot, tweaking the POV, and so on. Somehow you look up, and you’ve been at it for a year or two or five!
This isn’t meant to be discouraging because it’s something I think everyone goes through, but I do think beginning writers need to be patient with themselves and accept that developing a writing practice takes time.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
The most rewarding part of being a writer is when something you’ve been working on comes together. This might be a story, novel, a scene, an essay, anything. There’s always a point with every writing project where it feels like it just won’t ever work. It won’t make sense, it won’t “gel,” whatever it is you’re trying to do just won’t happen. And then it does! This happens because you kept at it, learned when and how to walk away and let your brain reset, and because as a writer you’ve gotten yourself out of these jams in the past. That’s the thing to remember, once you’ve written one thing, then everything else is possible.
Who do you write for?
I don’t think much about my ideal reader and what they might get out of my work. Ultimately, I’m following my own preoccupations and interests, and I hope that other people will find my work and enjoy it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
I will say that the journey of a piece of writing to a reader can be a strange, circuitous path. Reading anything at all—a novel, an article in a magazine, an essay, whatever—requires a journey that involves not only the writer but, chances are, an editor, maybe a slush pile reader, a critique group, an agent perhaps, and more. That’s a lot of steps where someone might decide a piece of writing just doesn’t work. So at a certain point writing becomes a collaborative endeavor, but it all starts with something that I, or any writer, finds interesting.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
All of my courses are built around the idea that emerging writers tend to run into walls that keep them from finishing their projects. We might come up with a great idea with a compelling setting and some intriguing characters, but too often we feel the story start to meander, wander, and sometimes sputter to a halt. In this class we’ll talk about plot structure and world building, but we’ll focus on our protagonist’s internal and external journeys. Are they going through the changes and challenges that make for compelling fiction? And how can we tweak and alter other story elements (plot, setting, supporting characters, dialogue, etc.) to keep them moving on an interesting and satisfying journey?
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Thanks, Richard!
Click here to learn more about Richard’s upcoming class.
