PPWC - Final Day (Sunday)

So this was the last day of the conference.

First up was Jaxine Daniels workshop "Character Building with Tony and Dr. Phil".  Jaxine made excellent use of slides & A/V.  One of the things I took away from  this talk was the notion that conflict does not have to be of the crossed swords, bazooka battle variety.  In fact, conflict can very work well when two "good" values or motivations are pitted against each other.  For example: one the protagonist wants to be honest with the rest of their team but cannot because he swore to keep something secret.

Next up was "Plot, Structure and Pushing Your Characters" with Hannah Bowman.  This was my favorite workshop for the morning - largely because my stories are sorely in need of structure.  Hannah went over the whole opening/story/climax cycle.  Like a presentation, it is a good idea for a story to have structure: it doesn't have to but it is a very good idea to have it.  She also talked about "Eucatastrophe" - something that Corey Olsen (the Tolkien professor) talks about.

The last work was "Fast as a Snail: Pacing" with Deb Courtney.  In this workshop Deb talked about using things like paragraph length and word choice to pick up the pace for a story.  She also read a bit of my work out loud - thanks Deb!

Overall, I'm glad I attended the PPWC.  I liked the way that I could strike up a conversation easily by just asking someone "What do you write?"  The other person would immediately know what I meant and we both felt at home talking about our work.

I wished there had been some sort of feedback workshop where people could come and get someone to read their stuff for 15min or so and get more feedback.  The feedback I got via the Read and Critique was wonderful, but it only covered the first two pages of my manuscript.

I learned a lot about writing and the world of writing for a living.  From story structure to how to market an e-book, the conference was crammed with information.  I would definitely recommend it to someone who is a "serious" writer or thinking of becoming one.

PPWC - Day 3 (Saturday)

The first morning workshop was "The Four-Hour Short Story Writer" with DeAnna Knippling.  Among the things she talked about was how you need to use standard manuscript format (she recommended William Shun's site for this), the structure for a story, and the use of "try/fail" cycles in writing.  Try/fail cycles are where the protagonist tries to overcome the obstacle for the story but then fails.

Twist Phelan and her workshop, "How to Keep your Readers up at Night," was next up on my agenda.  This was a workshop on how to build suspense in a story.  One of her points was to stack the odds against the protagonist and some of the ways of doing this.  For example, give the protagonist a disability or put them in a situation that is outside of their skills.

My third workshop for the morning was "Peak Productivity."  I liked this one the best of the morning workshops because there were fewer people and because I really felt the information was useful to me.  The big take-away from this workshop was the importance of breaking a large project into daily sub-goals.  For example, I may be daunted by the task of writing 20,000 words, but I can handle writing 1,000 words for 20 days.

In the afternoon I went to a panel discussion: "How to Draft a Novel: Pantsers vs.Plotters" with Becky Clark, Pam McCutcheon, Cindi Madsen and Aaron Richey.  This was a very fun workshop to be at because of the banter between the panelists.  It was also interesting to see different takes on how to write a novel: planning things out ahead of time (plotters) vs. going with the story as it develops (pantsers).  I guess I'm in the pantsers (from "seat of your pants) camp since I don't usually create an outline until after the first draft.

Next up was "Pixels to Profit" with Brian Schwartz.  As with the talk of his that I attended on Friday, Brian had a lot of good information.  He is probably also a very good public speaker - perhaps the best at the conference.  There were a lot of good points in this talk but the big one for me was that authors should use direct publishing (self-publishing) instead of indirect publishing when dealing with the e-book world.  Another thing I learned about from this workshop was a way of doing on demand publishing: lightningsource.com.  Apparently, many larger online vendors actually use these guys behind the scenes.

Last workshop for the day was a free-for-all discussion about critique groups: "Talkin' in Rockrimmon Critique Group Mash-up."  There was some useful information there, like that there are some good writing exercises to be found on tumblr.com, but for some reason I did not get as much out of it as I did with some of the other workshops I went to.  YMMV.

Tomorrow I will post about the final day of the PPWC.

PPWC - Day 2 (Friday)

So this is day two of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.  I started the day with "Small Steps to Big Books" with Matthew Frederick.  He introduced me to the concept of a writer's "platform" - the notion that you want to strive to build an up a sort of portfolio of work before you unleash your magnum opus.  He also made the point that you might want to introduce yourself to the world of publishing via a route that might not be the first thing that you think of - like commenting on web sites and writing book reviews on Amazon.

Next up was a "Read and Critique: Author" with Todd Fahnestock.  This was by far the most useful part of the conference for me so far because it involved feedback on some of my work.  Todd was also super nice while still giving useful criticism.  Listening to other author's works and the feedback they received was also very helpful - something that I hardly expected.

"How to Avoid Potential Roadblocks with Twist Phelan had some useful pointers regarding things to avoid in your book or story.  For example, she mentioned that having an action sequence for the sake of having an action sequence is a bad idea.

Brian Schwartz's "e-Book Covers" was also very useful because it covered how to market an e-book.  While I don't expect to make a living from my writing, I do want more readers.  Brian had lots of ideas, though one idea that I had was to narrate your own story and then send it in to various podcasts like my own personal favorite: the Drabblecast.

The last workshop that I went to was Barry Eisler's "Writing the Bad Guy Protagonist."  One of the points he made that rang true was the idea that how a character is viewed is often in the context of the other characters.  Having a "bad guy" as the protagonist can work if the other characters in the story are worse than he is.

Lastly David Liss talked at dinner about the role of negative emotions in the writing process.  He talked about his own experience of using fear and anxiety to motivate him in writing his first novel and how he actively tried to recapture that same energy when writing subsequent novels.

All in all a good day with lots of useful information.  Check back tomorrow for day 3 where I will review "How to Keep your Readers up at Night," (other than by playing music...loudly).

PPWC - Day 1 (Thursday)

In my quest for better writing skills I have signed up for a writer's conference - specifically the Pike's Peak Writers Conference.  After the myriad workshops that I will attend I feel confident that I can increase my number of readers from 2 to 3.  Especially if I guilt trip my wife into reading my stuff twice and if I continue to count myself as "one reader."

At any rate, I went to two workshops today: "Pitch Perfect" with Chris Mandeville and Bonne Hagan and one titled "Lie Like You Mean It" with Stephen Grapham Jones.

"Pitch Perfect" was essentially about how to prepare for a pitch to an agent who would then help you get your work published.  As an author who feels that their first book should probably be free, I would have thought that Pitch Perfect would be less useful then "Lie Like You Mean It" but the reverse was true.

In the "Pitch Perfect" workshop we worked on loglines, summaries and vocabulary.  Loglines are short (30 words or less) descriptions of what your work is about, while summaries are more in-depth descriptions of loglines.

Here is my logline for the upcoming "Puppet: Solder" story:

An average guy and his alien, mind-controlling amoeba must save the world from an invasion of Foosball-playing lizardmen.  Using chicken nuggets.

A summary is a more in-depth description of the logline.  Here's mine for Soldier:

On a near-future Earth, Earth is still rebuilding from the failed invasion of the Puppeteers: a mind-controller, amoeba-like race of creatures that tried to take over humanity “for their own good.”  Suddenly, a race of aggressive, Foosball playing, chicken nugget eating lizards start muscling their way through dimensional portals all over the planet in yet another bid for world domination.  It’s up to Mike, an average guys, and his Puppeteer side kick, a blob who is “fed up with the way that human/Puppeteer contact was handled,” to repel the lizards…while Humanity still controls the world’s foosball championship; and the world chicken nugget supply is safe.

The other workshop: "Lie Like you Mean it" by Stephen Graham Jones did not resonate with me as much because the current project that I'm working on is so outlandish that credibility got sucked out the airlock roundabout page 2 and hasn't come back since.  Never the less, some points I came away with were:

• Get the reader to identify with the prognostication
• Making the story a discovery process lends credibility
• Have a reversal/paradigm shift/whatever the changes the way the reader understands the facts of the story.
• Include details of certain situations.
• Use foreshadowing to get the "plant and bloom" effect.
• Add a true scene, perhaps with the names changed, to the story to add credibility to the entire story.

I would recommend both workshops to other people.  The Pitch one was surprisingly more useful to me than the Lie... workshop.  YMMV.