The Write Stuff

Long ago, the annual Writer’s League of Texas conference was called the Agents & Editor’s Conference. It cost under $300 and featured about two dozen industry pros in a weekend setting. The current edition for 2011 is likely to sell out at $439 and includes few editors. Training in the craft has slipped away from the schedule of the Texas Agents Conference, but it’s still a great place to pitch a book and learn how to do that better. A $250 flight away, there’s a bigger and better alternative, it would appear.

The San Francisco Writer’s Conference is only $106 more than the Austin event, if you register by Aug. 31. The 2010 conference sold out, perhaps on the strength of 50 writing workshops during the three days of the event — plus an Ask a Pro session of the editors, Speed Dating pitches, four included meals and multiple keynotes. That’s craft, that’s contact with the trade professionals, that’s meals. I’ve found decent rooms in downtown SF for as little as $80 a night, including wifi. The SF event is scheduled for Feb 18-20, 2011. It seems like a long way off until you start looking at the time left to do your revisions and write your bang-up synopsis. Plenty of details online at www.sfwriters.org.

Having been to San Francisco in February many times, I can report that it’s one of the best respites from Austin’s cedar season, has great public transit and feels like a real break you deserve over a long weekend. Or you can see how it goes for you in the Austin heat of June during 2010, then try a different approach at a conference backed by the 38-year-old Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency. The agency’s website says that its agents “must find new writers to stay in business.” That’s refreshing. So many agencies are sticking with series deals from established clients.

To be fair, the next conference in Austin features a pre-conference seminar led by Laurie McLean of Larsen-Pomada. She’s here in Texas looking for those new writers, too. $60 to attend McLean’s seminar. Extra, on top of the $439. If only Macworld Expo could move its 2011 meeting into February, I could make it an extended week-long trip. I guess it’ll be two respites from the cedar for me. Darn, only one handkerchief for the weekend, instead of one per day.

The journey is the destination, but making a living as a writer requires you to arrive at a moment when someone else invests in your talent. You might be a fiction writer selling a novel, or a non-fiction writer getting a proposal picked up, or a screenwriter seeing a treatment accepted with the follow-on screenplay assignment.

Of if you’re looking at self-publishing, the PayPal purchase notices and checks from readings go into your bank account. But you have arrived. Enjoy the moment. This might not be the hardest route to complete on your journey as a writer, says the screenwriter of W.

The movie that opened this weekend was written by Stanley Weiser. He wrote the screenplay for Wall Street, another Oliver Stone film. Weiser has this to say, in an interview with the Web site StoryLink, about what a writer faces after first success:

It was hard miles in the beginning. The problem is that once you start out and you have a movie, you think you’ve arrived. But once you have the break, it’s harder to come back than it is to arrive. It’s a long road. You have to keep reinventing yourself.

I’ve heard this second-book effect described another way, from the perspective of being in your first book, completing it and getting though publication. This first arrival is the only time in your career that you’re writing with no expectations from the public, a publisher, editors and reviewers. You get to invent yourself as a writer and your story as you know it. The next time out, you will be measured not only by that internal conscience of a creator, but the readers, viewers and your business partners, all of whom will look to your prior work.

At the Writer’s Digest Web site, the article Opening Scenes: An Overview details a double-handful of building blocks for a novel or short story.

It’s a great list, full of wisdom, humor, specifics and examples.

6. The Opening Line
Spend an awful lot of time on this sentence. In fact, more effort should be expended on your story’s first sentence than on any other line in your entire story. No kidding.

The Web article is an excerpt from Wes Edgerton’s book Hooked! Another title for the Workshop’s library, no doubt.

Take the suits and the corporate executives’ notes out of the creative process, turn to the Internet and some very talented friends and relatives. Spin out the idea of a musical comedy of a “low-rent supervillain wannabe” and you get Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

I kid you not. It’s wonderful, funny, sad and arch all at once. It’s 42 minutes long and was made for a budget “in the low six figures” according to creator and co-writer Joss Whedon. The fellow who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Serenity TV shows, all which he made kicking and screaming at the TV execs about how much they cost and what the stories should say. (Fox screwed up Firefly so badly in broadcast order they didn’t even air the pilot as the first episode.)

Enough of that. Give a creator a chance to cook up a story, without concerns about what you can’t do. A death ray that doesn’t work very well. A superhero who’s not a nice guy. A villain with a crush on a girl he sees at the laundromat. All devised by Whedon, his two brothers and brother Jed’s fiancee Maurissa Tancharoen.

But I give too much away. Watch the show at hulu.com or from the drhorrible.com Web site. See what can be done when story is king, and then the demand melts down the Web servers that deliver it to the eager viewers.

In a recent Time magazine article about the juggernaut of movies based on graphic novels, the beautiful creative space of writer Mark Millar — creator of nihilist graphic novel (and summertime movie) Wanted — explains it best.

His next comic is about a 100-year U.S. war in the Middle East, with superpowered soldiers and flying Islamic fundamentalists. It’s the kind of idea that would get squashed at a studio meeting, where the poor performance of all the Iraq-war movies would be trotted out. But then, Millar doesn’t need anyone’s green light. He just needs an artist and a pen.

Now that’s what I call a wonderful world to create as a storyteller.

The Amherst Writers & Artists practices form the foundation for what we do in the Writer’s Workshop. The AWA group trained me in leadership, then sent me back into Texas to found my own personalized practices.

Whether you participate in our community as a monthly manuscript member, or one of our weekly Tuesday night series writers, the AWA foundations still serve all of us who gather around the Workshop’s table. Pat Schneider is the guru of the AWA, and here’s what she reminded us this month:

If you have lived, you have a story. If you can speak your story, you can write it. It doesn’t matter who you are; you have been using language since you were an infant, and you already know how to use it to move those close to you. Everybody has a life, everybody has a story, everybody has a natural, internal understanding of craft.

This is a nurturing message no matter where you are in your writing life — learning how to speak out on paper, or polishing craft for submissions to publishers, or searching for the right story to start to tell in your own words. Everybody can write. We enjoy a mix of skill and experience levels among our members, including those who always hoped and knew they could write.

Mostly free, these pieces of software come by way of lifehack.org. Dustin M. Wax says

Since I’ve been eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping “writing” all week, it seemed natural to pull together some of the tools, sites, and Lifehack.org tips I know of that can help make writers more productive, organized, and creative.

If you like tools and sites to help you get creative or solve your writing challenges, check out the lifehack posting for The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource.

A very funny and insightful essay of the above title is out on the New York Times Web site. I enjoyed it because it poked some fun at some towers of traditional good reads. It’s also got a link to some great Web sites and literary blogs.

But at its core, the essay talks about detecting affinity for love through a reading list. Ever been to a new friend’s house and looked over the bookshelves? Ever browsed a Facebook or MySpace page just to see what’s in the Favorite Books section?

It’s a funny read, but has insights you might already know. For example, that women read more fiction than men. Or that men are far less likely to write off a pretty woman just because she’s ill-read. Then there’s this, from a woman who cast off a devotee of Ayn Rand:

“I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Based on a true story. The relentless lure toward so many movies. Film is an art form where the story’s structure is tantamount to bedrock. But veracity, the truth of reality, is a flimsy foundation for good writing.

A recent book arrival in my library, So You Want to Write, speaks to this. I’ve seen writing that wants to be compelling by being complete. A thorough accounting is the bedrock of this writing. That approach can be a mistake. Marge Piercy and Ira Wood, both novelists and authors of this book, explain.

For those who choose to fictionalize their life’s adventures… even a life full of incident however close to the truth, need to know something about plotting. Plot is the element of fiction most often in disrepute.

Not so for some readers. My beloved wife, an avid mystery reader whose tastes also run to non-genre literature, is my plot guru. She draws my eye to an element that “you dispense with at your own risk.” And a severe risk, too, especially in the view of Robert McKee in his screenwriting structure book Story.

But plot structure makes a life full of incident into a story we are hungry to read. Plot needs a spark, though. The characters’ inner lives are what makes writing sing a memorable tune. And characters, dreamed up and lived in your imagination, can lead to a fundamental plot, much better than Based on a True Story.

One basic plot is The Quest… the main character wants something and sets out to get it. What does your main character yearn for?

Yearning is essential to the practices of Robert Olen Butler’s Writing from Where You Dream. Yearning is a wonderful word to write next to your monitor or tape up next to your notebook while you create characters, people whose inner lives are a story’s bedrock. What is your character yearning for during your story? Even a True Story needs yearning.

My brother Bob sent along this link from Salon.com. In a letter to the site’s advice columnist, a recent MFA grad struggles with the task of getting the words onto the page after attaining an MFA.

Read the Cary Tennis column here

Graduation from an MFA program leaves a writer with plenty of bad critique habits, the need to stay within that MFA style, and sometimes no better writing discipline than when they were accepted.

Better just to keep on writing. An auto-didactic approach, to get specific.

Many things can get in the way of getting a book published. Contracts, rewrites, desire, editorial shifts. But having a contest victory in hand should give an author a better chance, right?

Right? Well, maybe not. A few summers ago I collected business cards at the 2006 Agents and Editors conference, presented by the Writer’s League of Texas. The League was once an Austin institution. Now it’s a statewide organization. The conference holds a manuscript competition. The winners in a half-dozen categories get applauded in a public presentation. In 2006 they were ushered off to meetings with agents.

I was filing business cards today and saw one from Beverly Bryant, whose card reports she’s the 2005 Mainsteam Fiction winner in the WLT Contest. I figured Beverly might have published her book Don’t Make Me Dance someplace by now.

I’m sorry to say not so, if Google and Amazon searches are reliable reporters. Same to be said for the winners in the overall category (Cold Dogs, by Richard L. Dutton) and Science Fiction-Fantasy-Horror (Travelers on the Smoke by Marjorie A. Stewart & Betty W. Hall).

I report this not because I wish any of these authors bad luck in their quest to publish. (And believe me, if you’ve been to the WLT A & E conference, plus submitted MS pages to the contest, you want to publish your book.) No, my point is that a contest victory is just one more hilltop on the mountain range of making your story into a book.

Few contest sponsors will portray their victors as the authors of ongoing projects. But you win a contest with a chapter at most. A publisher will want to see three, if your summary and synopsis will pass the eye of the editing needle.

I’m in rewrite purgatory now for Viral Times, so I’ve got less to show than even Beverly’s business card. But a contest entry (at $50 by now, for the WLT) up against several hundred other 10-page manuscript excerpts just doesn’t motivate me. Maybe you’ll find that finishing your book, then offering it to agents and editors, with a prize of being published, is the contest which you’d really like to win. Keep writing and get into a good manuscript group.