Have you read any of Catherine’s books? For conference details click here. Screenwriting will give you that discipline. Tight dialog doesn’t require genius, but it does require discipline. Then move from that experience to fiction, and everyone will think you’re a genius because you can write tight dialog. You have to learn to create great dialog and sympathetic characters, and rising drama and a gripping conclusion because, well, that’s what a screenplay is. Because the structure is so precise, and the demands so rigorous, that you can’t fudge anything.
Here is a writing tip from Catherine: If you want to write fiction, don’t write short stories: write screenplays. She was used to re-writing with experience of writing screen plays, so she tweaked it and the rest is history. Her sister recommended an agent, who read it and agreed to represent Catherine, but the book needed tweaking. It wasn’t until she showed her sister and her sister read it and said, “You need to submit this,” that she started thinking about writing to get published. Catherine didn’t write Dairy Queen for publication.
Her sister is adult fiction writer Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for Eat, Pray, Love. She started out as a screen writer and she attributes her success to that decade of writing. Her other books include The Off Season (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) and Princess Ben (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) and Front and Center (Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
Catherine Gilbert Murdock has agreed to join us on Saturday, June 5th to kick off the second day of the New Jersey SCBWI Conference with a keynote presentation, followed by a workshop and booksigning at the bookfair on Saturday afternoon.Ĭatherine’s first YA novel, Dairy Queen (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), won the Borders Original Voices Award, the Midwest Booksellers Award, the Great Lakes Booksellers Award, numerous Readers’ Choice awards, and is currently in production for a television series.
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