Hello fellow readers! Today I have author JL Bryan author of the Pranormal Series!!
You can visit the Paranormal Book Tour page for more information.
For today's post, Savannah asked me to talk about some of the influences on my writing. The books that have influenced me are too numerous to mention, but the good writing teachers I've had are not. So we'll talk about my best writing teachers today. In chronological order:
1. Mrs. Ewanowski. My seventh-grade English teacher. We had Creative Writing assignments where we had to turn in two pieces of writing, which could be poems or short stories. I turned in a short novel (60,000 words) for one of them. I don't remember what the other story was, but the novel was called Dogboy. It centered on an eleven-year-old kid who wore a polyester dog costume and believed himself to be a superhero. His best friend was Petey, also eleven, who constantly advised therapy and counseling for Dogboy (who never took off his costume, and whose real name we never learned). They ended up busting some villains, maybe bank robbers or jewel thieves, I don't really remember. My teacher was very impressed by the book and declared that I would be a famous writer one day. Still working on it, Mrs. Ewanowski.
2. Dr. Jeff Portnoy. I skipped my senior year of high school and instead did my first year of college at Perimeter, an Atlanta community college. Dr. Portnoy was my English teacher, and he had a unique approach to essay assignments. You wrote the essay and turned it in, and then he went through with a merciless red pen and marked up everything you did wrong. (It's his fault that I'm so picky about restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses, even to this day...) He would then return the essay to you, and you would revise it and return it to him. This continued the whole quarter with every essay assignment. You could do as many drafts as you wanted. At the end of the quarter, he graded the essays in whatever form they'd attained by that point. The constant feedback and revision greatly improved the quality of my prose and taught me how to look very critically at my writing. I learned so much from him that, for the rest of my college career, I turned in first drafts and got “A”s on them (and my degree was in English, so that's a lot of essays!). Much of what I know about revising at the language level was learned from Dr. Portnoy.
3. Paul Farr. He was my Creative Writing teacher at University of Georgia, and I believe he was a graduate student at the time. He was generally very encouraging and told me I ought to expand a couple of my stories into novels because they were very idea-rich. He would ask unexpected questions to make you reflect on your plot and characters in a new way.
4. Debra Baron. She was my screenwriting workshop teacher at the UCLA film school. Definitely the best craft teacher I've ever had. There's just something different about studying under someone who actually makes their living writing stories—not lecturing or grading papers, not deconstructing Shakespeare, but actually writing stories to entertain the public. She dazzled me by having a solution for every imaginable problem. She'd been there and done all of that. I still constantly refer to her advice. Example would be the principle of “reduce, reuse, recycle” applied to characters, settings, everything. Roll minor characters together to create substantial secondary characters. Really maximize your use of the characters and settings, too—one example I always remember is of characters are fighting in a fish market, and how you don't want it to be a boring fistfight or shoot-out. Make sure they're hurling crabs and lobsters at each other, or spiky blowfish—you've created the setting, so use it. The importance of subtext, using external objects and events to represent internal states and conflicts. A lot of this is centered on the medium of film: fewer characters and settings mean a smaller budget, for example, but it also makes your story much tighter and easier to follow. Less is more! I couldn't possibly list all the great things she taught me, but whenever I'm in a tight spot with something I'm writing, I can usually remember a trick or a solution she taught me for that exact circumstance.
These are teachers who encouraged my writing, believed in me, and taught me useful things about how to write. I'm very grateful that they were there to influence me and make me into a better writer!
Thanks so much for being here today and sharing with us your inspirations!
About the author JL Bryan:
J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories. He is the author of The Paranormals trilogy (Jenny Pox, Tommy Nightmare, and Alexander Death). Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in his new Songs of Magic series. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina, his son John, two dogs, and two cats.
Tommy Nightmare week:
Monday, October 24th - Reading in the Corner
Tuesday, October 25th - Books With Bite
Wednesday,October 26th - Paranormal Wastelands
Thursday, October 27th - Reading Angel
Friday, October 28st - About Happy Books
And now for the giveaways!
And for this stop we get a TRICK!
That means a not-so-mean trick: THREE extra entries into the Kindle Fire give-away! All you need to do is leave a comment on the post and they will automatically be granted THREE extra entries into the final tour give-away of a Kindle Fire!!
Enter here to win a Kindle Fire!!
Happy Reading!
