First Day - PennWriter's Conference

Here's a brief rundown of the first day (5-13-2011) of the conference from my perspective:

Again traffic was a mean bugger due to roadwork being done on 79. I attended 4 workshops and also was a part of the networking lunch.

09:15 - 10:15 Four Truths of Character with Romona Long
10:30 - 11:30 Break free from the Slush Pile with CJ Lyons
12:00 -   1:00 Networking Lunch
  1:30  -  2:30 Shaping Story Arcs with Romona Long
  2:45 -   3:45 Balancing Dialogue and Narrative with Terry Friedman

Four Truths of Character with Romona

During this workshop we learned the difference between a Pourquoi story and an Origin story.
We learned that the first two truths: Place in Society and Place in Family are based on facts and may or may not change. The two remaining truths are Personality and Flaw. These two are dependent upon the first two, and can change more readily.
She gave us examples from various well known books and we even worked on one of our own characters.

Break Free from the Slush Pile with CJ Lyons

A   very informative workshop with the writer CJ Lyons. She told us what what we should want from an agent and what we do not want in an agent. On the flipside, she also told us what agents were looking for in a client and what they did n
ot want. She gave us many resources to get further information.
For this workshop, if we wanted a chance to win a critique of a query letter from her agent, then we were supposed to have sent in a query letter a few weeks before the conference. She went a step further and gave us constructive criticism on ALL the queries she received. Anonymously, of course. I was quite pleased with what she had to say about mine.

Networking Lunch - This was such a wonderful opportunity to meet other aspiring authors and writers. I met some very interesting people. It was very positive and radiated with passion and commonality.
Oh, I had a chicken sandwich.

Shaping Story Arcs with Romona Long

Romona spoke to us about story arcs, within a single novel and also within a series of novels. It was fairly straight forward. She also told us that all characters, major and minor, have their own story arcs within the larger framework of the whole story (except, of course, the very minor characters where we don't need to know anything about them)

Balancing Dialogue and Narrative with Terry S. Friedman 

Again, a very insightful workshop. We learned about how much narrative/dialogue ration usually occur in a given genre. We covered Point of View in a fair amount of detail. There were some points that she brought up about switching POV within a story, that seemed out there a bit. I intend to do some more research on the subject and in a later post, describe what it was as well as give more detail about this workshop. It did open my eyes, and I liked what I saw.




After that, I left for home, another 2 hours one way because of the busy roadwork and congested traffic.
Overall, it was a very positive experience for me.

Tomorrow's post will cover the conference on Saturday 5-14-2011

PennWriter's Pre-Conference Seminar

PennWriter's Pre-conference seminars were held on Thursday, 5-12-2011. I attended one called "Many Genres, One Craft" which was a 9-4 session. The cost was a little over $100 and included a lunch and a complimentary copy of the not yet released "Many Genre's, One Craft" book on writing. The book was compiled of mostly new articles written for this release by a number of authors, and edited by Michael Arnzen and Heidi Ruby Miller, both of whom were also article contributors.

The morning section included instruction on the craft of writing fiction, and after lunch it focused on the business end of writing. I had just a few hours of sleep the night before, so I've forgotten quite a lot about the sessions.

We participated in a graded scheme that would inform us if we were either outliners, pantsers, or somewhere in between.  I lean a little more to outlining.

We were introduced to the "FreyReDuv" Plot Method, which unfortunately I don't think I can show due to  copyright. It's not as complex as it sounds. I still need to look into it further.

I wish there was more I could tell, but it was a long tiring day (for me, at least). Who needs sleep, right?

In the following days, I'll talk about each day at the conference in a little more detail, as I have most of my course notes (AND I was more alert!)