Monday, April 6, 2020 | 4-6:50 PM

Exercises that Guarantee Good Writing

Laura Scudder Conference Room, Roosevelt Hall 121

Writers don’t have time to do exercises that fail to produce good writing.  A simple “Write a dialogue scene” or “Write a description” exercise isn’t guaranteed to produce anything helpful except dialogue-punctuation practice and the encouragement of adjective and adverb overuse.  What kinds of exercises do writers use to guarantee good and useful results…and not waste their time?  The best and most successful often aren’t in books our magazine articles. In fact, they’re often passed along writer to writer like rituals in a secret society.  This workshop will violate the secrecy vow—and happily.

Bruce McAllister, Writing Coach, Writer, Consultant, Workshop Leader, and Agent Finder

Bruce McAllister is an award-winning West-Coast-based writing coach, writer in a wide range of genres, consultant in the fields of publishing and Hollywood, workshop leader and an "agent finder" for both new and established writers. As a writing coach, he specializes in all kinds of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and screenplays.

Bruce's literary and genre fiction has appeared in national magazines, literary quarterlies, college textbooks, and 'year's best' anthologies. His second novel, Dream Baby, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship winner, and was called a "stunning tour de force" by Publishers Weekly. His most recent novel, the autobiographical The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic, was a Cibils and Locus nominee. His fiction has been translated widely and received national awards and notable mentions in the New York Times, other U.S. newspapers, U.S. and foreign magazines and journals, and reference works for major publishers and literary presses. His poetry and experimental work have appeared in literary quarterlies and anthologies; he has co-edited magazines and anthologies; and his articles on popular science, writing craft and sports have appeared in publications like Life, International Wildlife, The Writer and newspapers across the country.

Bruce has been a writing coach and consultant on a wide range of popular books for major and smaller publishers and scientific books published by scholarly presses, including Pulitzer and National Book Award nominees; and a facilitator of autobiography and memoir workshops. At a private university in southern California, where he taught writing for twenty-four years, he helped establish and direct the Creative Writing Program, directed both the Professional Writing Track of that program and its Communications Internship program, received various teaching and service awards, and was Distinguished Professor of Literature and Writing from l990 to l995

His interests include cultural anthropology, creativity theory, storytelling, popular culture and popular fiction, Early Man archeology, advertising and the media, science and multicultural education, theory and methodology in the social and natural sciences, the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy, oceanography. The son of a career Navy officer and an anthropologist mother, he grew up in Washington, D.C., Florida, California and Italy; attended middle school and art school in Italy; received degrees in English and writing from Claremont McKenna College and the University of California at Irvine; has three wonderful children (Annie, Ben and Liz); and is married to choreographer Amelie Hunter. He lives in Orange, California.