Wisdom from William Bernhardt

     The world's greatest writers group meets twice a month on the first and third Thursdays. The first is our Critique night, when we offer suggestions and encouragement to members who share their work. The third Thursday is Creative night, when we are given a writing prompt that generally ties into a brief lesson on some writing aspect that members want to practice or experiment with. 
   On the occasional fifth Thursday we have what we call Education night, where someone volunteers to share something they are particularly knowledgeable about or research a topic of interest to the group and share what they find. Last week's education night we watched a video of a seminar by William Bernhardt.
     He is very entertaining in how he presents his material and it was a good experience. We were only able to watch the Introduction and a section on plot and character, but hope to see more of the video at a future meeting.
     A couple of things he mentioned in his intro were ten things (myths) that writers often believe about writing. I found a couple of them interesting because they are topics I have blogged about; one being the seven- plot theory. Bernhardt said there are fewer than that. His argument was that plot is always about a person's conflict either with an outside force, their own personal issues or when something they have to do or choose goes against what they believe.
     This follows the three basic conflicts of man-against-man (adversary), man-against-self and man-against-nature. I never thought of the man-against-nature as being man against his own nature or human nature in general. I always thought of it as man against nature meaning the elements. It could mean either, but this was a new perspective for me and I thought it was worth sharing.
     Bernhardt also touched on the topic of Character vs. Plot and how some people think one is more  important than the other.  He said what I determined in my several posts on the subject: you must have strong characters and a strong plot. Just one or the other doesn't work. Weak characters will ruin a good plot and a poor plot will not do justice to great characters. I feel this is always worth repeating.
     Bernhardt shared insights on people's beliefs about genre writing vs. literary and how all writing is in some way biographical and a few other things I would like to share in my next post.

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