Borderlands Boot Camp Review

I’m sitting at my computer today, feeling energized, renewed, and ready to rock for the new year. Why? I’ve recently returned from the Borderlands Writer’s Boot Camp for the Novel, the latest in the Borderlands writing classes offered by Elizabeth and Thomas Monteleone (the other is in Short Story Writing).

The Boot Camp experience is an intense exercise in the craft of writing, with special emphasis on how to grab the reader’s attention, eliminate clichés and over-done plot themes from your work, and construct effective dialog, narrative, and sentence structure.

All in three days.

Each boot camp is comprised of four instructors and 20 to 25 students. For the novel writing class, we were blessed to have authors Thomas Monteleone, Jack Ketchum, and Thomas Tessier, as well as senior editor Ginjer Buchanan, for our instructors. Between them they offered a fantastic wealth of experience and information, which hopefully I soaked up like the sponge I tried to be.

Although the program is held the third week in January, it actually began back in the summer, when those accepted into the class are given their first assignment: turn in the first three chapters of a novel, along with detailed character descriptions and a synopsis of the entire book. Then, in October, each student received a tombstone-heavy binder containing all the other students’ submissions. Assignment two was to read EACH submission and do a line-by-line critique. That meant more than 1,300 pages had to be reviewed in detail in only three months. Happily, the chapters submitted were interesting reads; many of them were so interesting I’d forget I was supposed to be editing!

Assignment three was to submit the first two pages of any other novel we’d written, or were working on. No reason was given for this assignment – like all Borderlands classes, the novel writing boot camp included a mystery we’d only find out about when we arrived.

I arrived on Thursday night, as I had the previous year when I attended the short story program, to relax and meet a few of the other students for drinks and conversation. On Friday, after a trip to Edgar Allen Poe’s grave (and a fruitless attempt to visit his house), I gathered my notebook and binder and headed off to class. After the initial introductions and schedule review by Elizabeth, whose infectious enthusiasm got everyone pumped up, we dove right into the first session: Hearing our two-page submissions read out loud by professional reader Tamara Keurajian (a key cog in the Borderlands engine).

The readings were done in anonymous fashion, and then each opening passage was evaluated by the class and instructors based on how effectively it grabbed the reader’s attention. This exercise was designed to show us how important a strong opening is for the reader, whether a person browsing in a bookstore or an editor trying to decide if the book has merit. The process opened many eyes, mine included, not only because we had the opportunity to see how our writing resonated with other people, but also by allowing us to view first-hand what professional authors and editors looked for in a story or book.

Afterwards, we received our final assignment: to write the first two pages of a new novel, which would be critiqued on Sunday morning. Naturally, these pages had to be written in the few hours of free time we had after classes and during meal times.

Knowing that on Saturday we would have 90 minutes for lunch and 90 minutes for dinner, I decided I would write my pages during those mealtimes instead of at night after class, choosing instead to avail myself of the wit and wisdom of our instructors in the hotel lounge.

Unlike horror cons, at Borderlands you have the opportunity to sit and speak one-on-one with the same authors whose books you’ve read and who’ve just spent the day showing you how to improve your writing skills. During the course of the weekend I had on an in-depth conversation with Brian Keene (a frequent guest at the Borderlands sessions) on the current business of writing, talked with F. Paul Wilson (one of the short story instructors) about book collecting and the overuse of certain plots, and conversed with Jack Ketchum about which are the best cons to meet writers and editors. Those moments alone were worth the price of the course!

Just as important was the time spent with my classmates, sharing our hard-luck stories, congratulating each other on recent sales or acceptances, commiserating about rejections, and comparing our experiences with the various editors, publishing houses, and magazines. It was a rare and welcome change to exchange information with our peers, those of us who are hopefully the future of horror, the next generation of dark, imaginative writers.

On Saturday, class began promptly at 8:30 a.m. For the next 10 hours, with only 90 minutes for lunch, we rotated in groups of four and five between the instructors, carrying out round table-style critique sessions of each others’ novels. Each instructor focused on a specific area, such as plot or dialog, and the students would take turns discussing their opinions and observations, followed by a professional analysis by the instructor. This is the point where many potential authors might be tempted to shrink away from ever attending such a class. After all, it can be a blow to the ego to see your hard work and creative soul laid bare, torn apart, and dissected. But there’s no other way to become a better writer, and all the criticisms, while sometimes hard to hear, were on the mark and delivered with no personal bias or mean intent.

The fact that for me, and for the people I sat with more than once, the same issues kept being pointed out by both instructors and students, illustrated how the problems were in the writing, not in the ability of a particular reader to ‘get it.’ I walked away with a much clearer understanding of where my strengths and weaknesses lay, and how to take control and eliminate (or at least minimize) those weaknesses.

While this was going on, the short story class was undergoing a similar stripping away of their pretensions to expose the core of potential beneath the outer layers of amateurish folly. This year’s short story class had the good luck to work with F. Paul Wilson, David Morrell, Douglas Winter, and Elizabeth Massie. I had a chance to speak with a few of the students in that class, and they agreed their experience was every bit as eye-opening and valuable as ours.

Sunday morning: After dragging my sorry butt from the ultra-comfortable hotel bed, I gulped down a hearty breakfast of coffee, juice, and oatmeal, only to find out that we’d be reading our new two-page novel opening ourselves, in front of the entire class. As I shuffled between the pages I’d written, which I’d never thought to practice out loud the day before, I considered different ways of combating my nervousness. Imagine the audience naked? No, not a good idea! Fortify myself with liquid courage? Even for a writer, 8:30 was a bit too early. Finally I decided to just get up and read, damn it! And I did. I’m still alive, so I guess that’s saying something for my first public reading.

To our pleasure and surprise, all the instructors agreed they’d seen a dramatic improvement in our ability to craft a strong opening, utilizing what we’d learned in terms of setting the scene, grabbing the reader’s attention, and delivering a hook to make the reader want to keep turning the pages. Lest you think they were just ‘blowing smoke,’ we students agreed amongst ourselves that the difference was amazing.

In summary, the Borderlands Boot Camp for Novel Writing was an exercise in learning, sleep deprivation, and relationship building. I strongly urge any writers who want to improve their craft, whether you’re already published or not, to sign up when the next session is announced. You won’t be sorry, and you‘ll acquire skills that will hopefully stay with you for as long as you write.

Pictures can be viewed here..