Borderlands Bonanza

About two weeks ago I attended the Borderlands Boot Camp. This is a genre-centric writing workshop where novice writers can study for three days under horror masters like Mort Castle, Tom Monteleone, Gary Braunbeck, Douglas E. Winter, Elizabeth Massie and F. Paul Wilson, to name a few. I've wanted to blog about the experience here, but I did not want to hype it up or turn it into a dear diary post. So I've spent the past week and a half mulling over what was the most important aspect of Borderlands, and it's that you'll get a new asshole. Painful, yes, but entirely necessary.


Writing is a lonely and insular activity. This cerebral isolation allows writers to live in their heads, making it easy to miss fatal flaws despite countless edits. The most important thing for a new writer to learn is how to get out of her skull to look at her story. You do this by dissecting the "creation," looking under its skin to scrutinize its plot, point of view, grammar and style, and dialogue. Sometimes you don't want to see the bloody organs, but the Borderland instructors force you too. They read your manuscript, make diligent notes, and itemize what sucks without blinking an eye. They'll also tell you what works. Pure unadulterated feedback. You will be ripped for tense change, dialogue tags, world building, verbosity, sparsity, pacing, manuscript formatting and a million other nits and nats. Once you've been ripped though, you'll never forget it. In fact, you begin to find these same flaws in best selling paperbacks. Most importantly, now you see them in your work. That horrible manuscript you stared at for six months suddenly seems salvageable.

To find out more:
http://www.borderlandspress.com/workshops_2010.html