Don t Miss Out! Pay It Forward

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1 THE GABRIEL WRITER The Gabriel Writer Page 1 May 2018 A Publication of the San Gabriel Writer s sangabrielwriters.com On Thursday, May 3rd we will be honoring the four winners of our Writing Contest at Meridian High School. They will be arriving at 6:30 PM, and so we want to come at the same time. Refreshments of lemonade, coffee, and brownies will be served. Join us early for the Award Presentation and then we will have our Speaker! Don t Miss Out! The names of two dozen members are posted our website and half of them have links to their websites or personal introductions to promote their love of writing. Are you among them? Check out our Members page to look for your name. If you re not listed, join San Gabriel Writers League online for only $25. Then you can submit your weblink or a 50-word introduction online, as well. Don t miss out! Pay It Forward Need tips to run a book launch? Looking for a list of professional book reviewers? Check out the San Gabriel Writers League Resources page. That s where we share what we ve learned for the benefit of others in our organization. If you have tips for writing, publishing, or promoting books, submit your info online on the same webpage. Pay it forward!

2 The Gabriel Writer Page 2 SGWL MINUTES Minutes of the San Gabriel Writers League Meeting April 5, 2018 Meeting was called to order at 7:02 pm The meeting was held at the IHOP Restaurant in Georgetown, TX. Old Business: None New Business: Kerry Stevens reported that he has placed a Resource Page on the website. He would like to post experiences with writing query letters and posts for publishing books, etc. Brags: Hector Timourian was profiled in the SunRays for last month. Nell Newton says that she has written articles for the SunRays for the past two months. Writing Contest: Janet Kilgore reported that we received 12 entries for the contest with Meridian High School. Winners are to receive money prizes. Janet will send the volunteers a judging template. This month some of the members read from their writings. These included: Marty Sheldon Kerry Stevens Paul Fronczek Hector Timourian Gary Miller Dave Ciambrone ViJay Davar James Frazier Meeting adjourned at 8:02.

3 The Gabriel Writer Page 3 This Week s Honorary Guest Myra Hargrave McIlvain is a teller of Texas tales. Whether she is sharing the stories in her books, her lectures, or her blog, she aims to make the Texas story alive. She has free-lanced as a writer of Texas historical markers, written articles for newspapers all over the country and for magazines such as Texas Highways. She has had nine books published all Texas stories. Her award-winning THE DOCTOR S WIFE and STEIN HOUSE are historical fictions that tell the story of the German seaport of Indianola. Her latest nonfiction is the award-winning TEXAS TALES: STORIES THAT SHAPED A LANDSCAPE AND A PEOPLE, a collection of Texas stories. McIlvain lives in Austin with her husband.

4 Are There Only 7 Stories in the World? The Gabriel Writer Page 4 Writer s Tip Many academics, most notably author Christopher Booker, believe that there are only seven basic plot structures in all of the storytelling frameworks that are recycled again and again in fiction but populated by different settings, characters, and conflicts. Those seven plots are: 1. Overcoming the Monster 2. Rags to Riches 3. The Quest 4. Voyage and Return 5. Rebirth 6. Comedy 7. Tragedy This list comes from Booker s seminal book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. It took him 34 years of research and reading to complete the 700-page psychoanalytic tome. But where did the idea of a limited number of stories come from? Is it true? If so, how does that affect writers all of whom strive to create their own unique stories? Let s dig a little deeper into this idea. Although The Seven Basic Plots is the most frequently cited text today, Booker was not the first person to propose that there are a limited number of stories. A list made by Foster-Harris in 1959 claimed there are only three stories: Happy ending Unhappy ending Tragedy While you can place every story you can think of into one of these three groups, it s overly simplistic, offering little in the way of observation of actual story structure. More recently (and perhaps intriguingly) the University of Vermont took a leaf from one of author Kurt Vonnegut s theories and used powerful computer programmes to analyze 1,737 fiction stories. The purpose was to track the emotional content by looking for words such as tears, laughed, enemy, poison and so on. They describe building happy emotions as rise, and sadder emotions as fall. Their results concluded that there were six basic master plots: Rags to riches (rise). Tragedy, or Riches to rags (fall). Man in a hole (fall rise). Icarus (rise fall). Cinderella (rise fall rise). Oedipus (fall rise fall).

5 The Gabriel Writer Page 5 Winners of the Writers Contest 1st place Layla Phoisiri Ashes and Stardust 2nd place Ankni Banerjee Blood and Ashes 3rd place Jesse Gail An Island of Oceans Honorable Mention Ryan Gabrillo Orgination We would like to thank every student who submitted their works and we would like to say Meridian certainly has a group of talented young writers and staff of teachers. We will make the awards at our regular meeting on May 3rd at the Georgetown Public Library here in Georgetown. The award recipients will be first up on our program, which begins at 6:30 pm.

6 The Gabriel Writer Page 6 SGWL Board of Directors President Donald Guerrant DonaldGuerrant@msn.com Vice President/ Program Coordinator Richard Glasco richardglasco@msn.com Corresponding Secretary & Historian Treasurer & Membership--- Dues $25 Janet Kilgore Janet-kilgore@austin.rr.com Member at Large Paul Fronczek Plumt00easy@gmail.com Newsletter Bear Williams emiliow1124@gmail.com Website Designer Kerry Stevens kerrylstevens@gmail.com