Salutations, friends. Hope your week went well, mine did.
Graduation
My littlest sister has graduation Magna Cum Laude from WSU with a Psychology degree. We are so proud of her and I had the pleasure of watching her walk the walk and hide from the cameras after as much as she could. I am so excited for her future and where it will go from here. So many possibilities.
Writing
I am still feeling my way to a process for the novel I want to write. I have a protagonist I adore speaking incessantly in my mind’s theater. He struts about ranting and bragging and occasionally revealing bits of his story to me. I see a little bit of a couple subplots and the start of the main one but the rest remains shrouded. This time I won’t give up. I will write and finish a novel no matter how much it sucks.
Write on the River
I attended the Write on the River writing conference for the first time yesterday and I am very glad I went. Terry Brooks was the keynote speaker. I have adored his work since I was 13 years old and I am so glad I had the opportunity to speak with him face to face. He and his wife are wonderful people.
Samuel Ligon hosted a workshop on Novels: Launches and Landings and while I have never heard of him before I greatly enjoyed learning from him. One thing that I took away from his lecture was the idea that writers need to maintain a balance between ego and failure. Ego so we have the confidence to submit and keep writing. Failure so we realize that we need to keep improving as nothing is ever good enough. I myself have a healthy dose of the failure side of things, I am working on the ego part.
Randall Platt workshopped on Character Etching. She handed out a nice poem about all the wonderful things that are accomplished only after a lot of failures. She also handed out the interview sheet she uses to get to know her characters and in the workshop we created Wendell Hopscotch, age 37, born in an abandoned fish hatchery to unwed teens. From there he only got more interesting and real and he touched something in all of us. She also posed the question “why spend your life fighting for other peoples dreams?” A question that I feel in my soul and am looking forward to acting upon.
The last workshop I went to was given by Anjali Banerjee about Avoiding the Pitfalls of the Middle Grade novel. She taught about having your protagonist “save the cat” in the first few pages to make them redeemable and sympathetic to the reader. She also highly recommended finding a mentor that is further up the trail, they will teach you so much more than writing groups.
If things work out right next year, I hope to return. It was a wonderful experience and I recommend it to any writer, aspiring or not.
