My Biggest Takeaway: 2015 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference

DSCN9802Every year, after the dust of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference has settled, I look back and see what my biggest takeaway is. After all, it’s good to see what you’re getting out of any experience so you can judge your return on investment. In past years, my takeaways have included a lessening of my pitching panic and a creative awakening.

This year, I met a lot of people, including some I only knew from social media. That’s always fun, to finally meet someone in real life! I didn’t get to spend as much time chatting with them as I would have liked, but it was nice to put a voice with the face. Now I can read their posts and hear their voices.

Even on my limited budget, I managed to buy a few books which now reside in my To-Be-Read pile—in line right after the library books. I bought one craft book and one fiction book, and I’m still deciding which to read first.

And of course I learned a lot. All those workshops…my head was spinning by the end of each day! I really enjoy learning how different authors approach the various stages of writing, from brainstorming to editing. Sometimes I pick up a tip that resonates with me, and other times I know immediately that their process would never work for me. But I still like learning about it so I can refine my process.

This year, the one idea that my brain keeps circling back to is from Fran Wilde’s Short Story class. She spoke about raising the stakes and said that your character should be in more danger BECAUSE they fulfill their need. In other words, fulfilling Need A allows them to go after Need B, which is harder and more dangerous than Need A. Getting Need B kicks them up to the even more difficult Need C, and so on.

I had never thought of it like that before.

I knew, of course, that your stakes have to consistently raise throughout a story. But I always thought of it as somehow a random thing. For instance, “Okay, my hero achieved something, but now I need something harder than that. All right, send in zombie unicorns.” I think I thought of the new threats, the higher stakes, as coming from external forces not necessarily tied to the inner stakes, although I knew they had to raise as well.

This idea of stepping-stone stakes tied intimately to fulfillment of the hero’s needs intrigues me. Fran was talking about short stories, but I can see how this would work as well for novels. By arranging the hero’s needs in a hierarchy and then starting with his most basic need and working his way up, there is a natural build to the stakes. And the tight cause-and-effect structure makes for a more solid story overall.

I’m in the middle of a massive revision right now, and once I’m done this phase I will go back and look at my stakes in light of this new understanding.

So my biggest takeaway this year was a structural revelation. What was your biggest takeaway?

Collaboration: The Meeting of the Minds

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that my middle grade WIP, The Egyptian Enigma is the product of a collaboration with two totally awesome co-writers, James Kempner and Jeff Pero. You will also know that we just got incredibly detailed and spot-on notes from developmental editor Kathryn Craft on said WIP. So now we have massive revisions to do.

How do you do that with three people?

The revisions are fundamental in that we have to restructure the plot. That means adding scenes, re-envisioning existing scenes, and cut, cut, cutting what we already have. In essence, it means starting over.

I don’t mean totally, of course. There are many existing scenes we will be able to rework and salvage, and our characters will remain much as they are. But since the plot needs so much work, our process is starting over again.

We are having a meeting Dec 28 to discuss everything and get a new outline for the book. We have an agenda, because with 3 authors it is important to know what we will talk about so as not to waste time or run off on tangents. We know from experience that we can only work productively together for about 3 hours and then our focus collapses. So we have no time to lose. Thus the agenda.

To make our time even more efficient, we are all going to email each other our ideas for the new plot. We will do this a week before we meet, so we have time to read and react and absorb everyone’s ideas. Then we will discuss on the 28th and come to a final plot, a final outline. The hope is that the best of our ideas will come together and create some alchemical magic so we have a lean, strong, potent new outline.

Once we have that, I get to work. I will write the new first draft. Then it goes to Jim, who gives it to Jeff, who gives it back to me for a final voice revision.

Before all of that, though, there will be the meeting of the minds—and the synergy that comes with it.

The Sagging Middle: A Structural or Psychological Problem?

I went to the monthly Writers’ Coffeehouse run by the Liars Club this past Sunday in Willow Grove, PA. One of the things we talked about was the problem of the “sagging middle.” One of the attendees said she was new to fiction writing (had been a poet) and had gotten about halfway through the book and was now tired of it. She asked for ways to get past this.

Advice came immediately, because what author isn’t familiar with that middle-of-the-book sag? The usual culprit for this sagging middle is structural – something about your plot needs fixing. Typically, adding tension to the plot at this point will charge up that middle and bring it back to life. Often you can accomplish this by changing the challenge the main character faces. For example, your MC has been trying to solve X. He solves X, only to find that it opens up larger problem Y. Problem Y then carries you to the end of the story.

It occurred to me, though, that we had addressed the structural facet of the sagging middle, but not the psychological. This writer was new to fiction. She’d written several short stories, but this was her first novel. It could be that there is no problem with her structure, but that she simply had writer’s fatigue.

A novel is a huge undertaking. It is a marathon, not a sprint. If it is your first one, it is understandable that it can wear you down. Her words seemed to hint at that: “I am tired of it.” So, when your mid-novel sag is due to psychological fatigue, how do you combat that?

There are as many ways as there are writers, but some that work for me are:

• Skip ahead to the end, or a scene you are excited about writing.
• Hop over to a completely different project for a while.
• Take a long walk, or a shower, or something relaxing that frees your subconscious.
• Read a book.
• Listen to some music.

How do you cope with your mid-novel slumps?

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