For the first time in its 13-year history, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books will focus on the writing process.
By introducing six two-hour writing seminars led by award-winning authors, the festival promises 50 attendees in each seminar access to renowned authors’ instruction on their craft.
The seminars cover a variety of genres, including screenwriting, poetry and biography, and will take place on both Saturday and Sunday.
Maret Orliss, the festival’s programming manager, recognizes that a large number of aspiring writers attend the festival each year, and as a result, she supervised the creation of workshops that target writers’ concerns.
“It was a way of providing them with something more than what the festival already does, by courses specifically on the craft of writing rather than on some of the broader themes that the panels already discuss,” she explained.
Having chosen the instructors based on how recognized they are within their specific genre, Orliss feels confident that their advice will be invaluable to writers.
“It’s about getting the highest quality instructors we can,” she said. And while famous names may draw festivalgoers to the seminars, Orliss claimed quality was more important than celebrity in the selection process.
Stephen J. Cannell, bestselling novelist, screenwriter and winner of the WGA Paddy Chaefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement, intends to offer practical advice on composition and marketing methods to students in his “Television, Film and Bestselling Novels” seminar.
“I have a lot of what I think is helpful information that I can pass on, from the very basic “˜What is a three-act structure? What should be in each act?’ making it really easy to remember so that students are able to plot a three-act play. … I’ve used these methods for years, and they’ve never let me down,” he said.
Quality and a famous instructor however, come at the price of $100 for the general public and at $75 for students. Orliss compares the seminars to writing classes that attendees would normally have to pay for.
“We wanted to charge something because … it’s offering a lot of things that the free panels aren’t able to offer, and traditionally, classes you do have to pay to go to them, in order to have that intimate access and the specificity of instruction,” she said. “So it excludes people that would just like to go and hear what they have to say, but it isn’t anything that’s above and beyond what anybody else does when they’re providing this type of opportunity.”
Orliss anticipated a large amount of student interest in the seminars, and to accommodate this interest, half of the seats in each seminar were offered to students at a 25 percent discount if they registered before April 20.
“We are aware that students are on a limited budget and may not be able to pay the full price,” she said. “We realized that if we made a portion of the seats available to students before they became available to the general public, we would be appealing to a really important populace.”
While Tory Adkisson, a third-year English student with a creative writing concentration, recognizes that 25 percent is a significant discount, he does not think that the festival’s organizers have gone far enough to make the seminars financially accessible for all students.
“I appreciate the gesture, but it’s really insufficient,” he said.
“As much as I would love to attend, the money is such an issue for me as a student in these days of soaring gas prices and tuition fees.”
Moreover, Adkisson disagrees with the notion that money rather than talent determines admission to the seminars.
“It all seems very sort of exclusive, and I would even say slightly elitist, that you have to pay to get these writers’ secrets,” he said.
Stephen Yenser, an English professor and creative writing director at UCLA, acknowledges that the writers leading the seminars are highly distinguished. However, he remains skeptical about how useful the didactic, 50-person seminars will be to individual writers.
“A seminar that has 50 people in it is not really a seminar. There won’t be very much time for individual interaction,” he said. “The more abstract it is, the less useful it will be to writers.”
Having conducted one-off poetry writing seminars ““ unique seminars that are offered only once ““ himself, Yenser feels that the format proves most successful when it specifically focuses on the attendees’ work instead of merely giving advice and answering questions on the writing process.
“One-off seminars can work, if you have eight or 10 students, if you have three hours, if you have read the students’ material and the students have all read each other’s material,” he said.
While Yenser believes that these seminars may be beneficial for naive writers, he thinks more experienced writers will not gain any helpful information.
Orliss acknowledges that there are concerns with the seminars’ format.
However, she thinks this year’s seminars will be a learning experience that will provide the basis for modifications in subsequent years.
“Being the first year is obviously a sort of test case in many ways,” she said. “We’ll see how this is going to work, and we’ll learn from it on how to improve.”