Mountain Words Literary Festival: Premise in writing process

If one concept stands out as a thread to connect so many of the brilliant writers and presenters I've experienced this past long weekend at the Mountain Words Literary Festival in Crested Butte, Co, it is the guiding idea of a "premise" for the writing project, the essay, the book.

1. Friday morning I started off the festival weekend with a workshop on writing a play in two hours led by Steven Cole Hughes, a Visiting Professor of Theatre at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, CO. A dynamic and authentic teacher, he brought us back to Aristotle's three elements of a story: beginning, middle, and end. To which Steve added possibly the most important 4th element: premise. According to Steve, "You mean something and you are trying to affect your reader in some way. Be aware of why you said something." 

Aristotle names 6 elements of theater:

• plot
• character
• theme (premise)
• music
• diction
• spectacle

A premise is "a statement that is provable by the events of the story." I am a lover of sentences, and so Steven spoke to my own process of writing when he focused his teaching on "the way the story is told, word for word, the drama of the sentence." What is the story you are setting out to tell? Keep this statement in mind as you write in any genre that involves storytelling.

2. My next spectacular workshop, titled "Poems for which we are grateful," was led by Aaron A Abeyta. I fell in love with his writing two years ago in the first Mountain Words festival. In this workshop, Aaron drew from the teachings of W.H. Auden for certain essential questions he asks himself of the poem and the subject as he is writing. Aaron spoke about how he finds the poems he is most grateful for seem to ask some essential questions, personal as well as philosophical:

• why am i writing this? 
• whose poem is this?
• what is the universal question I am asking here that has been asked a thousand times already?
• what parts of me are emerging here? 
• What place is emerging? 

For Aaron, poems ask questions that perform as the guiding premise for the writing of that poem. If you are getting stuck in a certain draft, go back to these questions and see what question must be asked next. Szymborska wrote, "Whatever inspiration is, it is born from the continuous question, "I don't know." I thought that Abeyta, as a teacher, bravely and with humility held high standards for us writers in the room, and asked for everything of his students. He asked us to ask  ourselves, what is our guiding question in our life? 

3. Laura Pritchet PhD directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Her workshop approached storytelling through flash and fragments, experimental forms that provide fresh methods to write about challenging subject matter. Climate change, racism, society division, despair, can be illuminated through lists that subvert the standard "10 Rules of..." offerings online. Snippets unrelated through causality with large leaps between the fragments. The epistolary form can bring in voices and perspectives of others. And her favorite, the hermit crab essay/poem/piece of writing finds just the right container to crawl into and take over as its form. You must find just the right form for what you want to write about. 

For all of these experiments, the writer must also be aware of the theme or underlying meaning. Laura told us to say something that matters to you so that your writing can become an act of connection between you and the reader. She read a beautiful example of using these short fragmented forms from her latest book, Playing with (wild)Fire, that consisted of four paragraphs, each one a different character's third person description of that moment in time. Her characters were human as well as mammal and bird.