Grrrl Con 2017 Day 3 Notes Write-Up

Opening Keynote

We brought on day 3 with a keynote from Kerry Ryan (@writelikeagrrrl), Jane and Claire - ‘Just Fucking Do It: Maintaining momentum after Grrrl Con’.
They asked us to set 5 realistic goals that we wanted to achieve in the next year. And then asked us to find a ‘motivation buddy’ to keep check on us and make sure we were achieving those goals.

Morning Workshop

The first workshop I had on day 3 was Hannah Kate’s (@hannahkateish) ’Creating Space, Place and Atmosphere’. We started by playing a Hannah Kate-ish version of Taboo. Where we took a card and had to describe the thing on the card without adjectives. As I wasn’t sure I knew what an adjective was I had to take a back seat and just listen and learn.

Hannah's advice was to write as you normally would and then go through the same piece of writing and take the adjectives out. That way you can see if you really need them at all.

You can also try changing the adjective to a verb to see if it still works. Or try using a metaphor instead.

We were given 3 extracts from books and not told what the stories were or who wrote them. All of the people in the books became more like objects even though they were all stories about people. We had to pick one and write a continuation of the scene. I picked the third. A person, unknown to us as all names were taken out of the extracts, arrives at a school in a truck. You don't know if it is a man, woman etc or why they are there. I continued it as a delivery driver bringing equipment to the school.

At the end of the exercise we were given the names of the books and the authors:

Extract 1 - Life, A User Manual - George Perret
Extract 2 - Games at Twilight - Anita Desai
Extract 3 - Twilight - Stephanie Meyer

I have read Twilight and I had no idea that that is where the extract came from. It shows you how just removing the names of people from the story makes you think of the scene you read in a totally different way.

Adjectives for colours, ages, times, sizes, can be really effective if you just use one particular adjective. For example, extract 2 used a lot of colour. Similarly can be useful to just use one sense.

Hannah told us all to look at a stock photo of a scene. A sunny day, a rainy day, it didn't matter. But she told us to put a different outcome on that same picture. A sunny day where a wedding is about to happen, or the same sunny day where a murder is about to happen. You will notice different things in the photo for each outcome your story takes.

We then did a photo challenge of our own. Hannah gave us a sheet of 4 pictures. None of which had people in them - an old looking council block, a fairground roller coaster, an old crumbling building, and a deserted beach. We each had to pick one and write about it.

Finally Hannah told us that a character's reaction to a place can be more telling than how they're feeling.

Afternoon Workshop

After lunch we had our last workshop of the weekend, mine was Cheryl Martin’s (@cherylalaska) ‘Every Grrrl has a story’.

We started out with a little getting to know each other exercise where we partnered up and each told our partner two truths about us and one lie. We then went around the room and introduced our partners by name and by telling these three "facts" about them. As a group we then had to determine the lie.

One of the most useful things I took away from this exercise was that something you can do to make your characters more three dimensional is to add in assumptions about them from other character's points of view. If you have two truths and one lie, the lie is usually the less complicated of the three things said. So flip that on it's head and make the lie the more thought about and complex.

Once we were all very familiar with each other Cheryl told us not to sensor ourselves in this workshop. Nobody would be made to share anything they wrote so don't be afraid to write it. Cheryl gave us our first task. She asked us to go back and examine a moment in our lives when everything changed for us. For better or worse. She gave us a prompt of being around the age of 15 but said it could be earlier or later depending on what came to us as the stand out moment. Write about what life was like before, and what it was like after.

Remember the details, where, what, why? The date, the time, the season, what was the weather like, what could you hear, smell, taste, touch? Once we were done Cheryl asked us to write a monologue of this moment. Mine became my blog 'A Letter To 13 Year Old Me' - http://willow23s-firsteverblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/a-letter-to-13-year-old-me.html.

Needless to say I found this to be the most useful workshop of the whole weekend. It was almost like therapy.

Closing Keynote

Our final keynote came from publisher Sara Hunt of Saraband (@sarabandbooks), 'More in common than things that divide us'.

She told us about Nasty Women, a collection of essays and accounts of what it is to be a woman in the 25th Century.

"Writing can inspire, educate, inform, entertain, amuse, incite, frighten. It can provide a living, journalism, advertising, corporate communications, PR, playwriting, scriptwriting, speech writing, writing for motivational or spiritual charities, but for most people it probably won't."

She had lots of advice to impart on us about the minefield that is publishing. Non-fiction is an easier market to break into as it has it's own audience whereas with fiction you're facing off against so many genres, other authors who already have a fan base etc.

If you want to get people to read your work, you need to market it well. It needs to be well written and well researched. Research the genres that interest you.

Children's and young adult fiction is a growing market. Literary fiction is the hardest to get published.

If you want to write fiction and get published, short stories are a great way to find your voice, and quite often can be published in magazines etc. 

Which authors do you like? Do your writing strengths suit the genre you're writing? Consider humour, plot, characterisation and pace.

Google competitions for unpublished authors as it will look good on your CV if you were to win one of these.

Work on your pitch. When approaching publishers do your homework on them. Look at what their submission guidelines are. Only send to relevant publishers. Check your cover letter for attitude and errors, make comparisons to other works they may have published but don't over promise.

In the synopsis ensure you convey the content, plot, characters, setting, and style etc of your book. Finally, what is your unique selling point?

Some publishers have open submissions so check when these are.

Grrrl Con 2017 Day 1 Notes Write-Up

Opening Keynote

Friday morning began with a keynote address by Novelist Jenn Ashworth (@jennashworth) who came to talk to us about ‘Finding the courage to write and keep on writing’. I soon discovered that she had spent time in my home town of Preston in her youth, and I felt like I was listening to a kindred spirit with some of the things she was saying. How school wasn’t a fit with her, how she didn’t really have friends, how she found solace in books. And most importantly about how as women we often have to ‘don armour’ to protect ourselves, and that courage can be found in being vulnerable. She also talked about her community of writer friends and how much she takes from the support they give her. I was almost in tears. Her words resonated so clearly with me and the courage I have gained from the group of writers I have in my own support group.

Some pearls of wisdom that I took from Jenn’s talk included - Don’t let research get in the way, if you wait until you know everything you’ll never write it. If you find when you’re writing that you need more information on something, block it off and write 'need info on…' The first draft is your guide to what you need for the second draft.

She also told us that 'when the well is empty, do whatever you can yo fill it up'. What Jenn does between projects is read, visit an art gallery, use that time to re-charge creatively.

Jenn then read an excerpt of her novel Fell which sounded intriguing. As we took our first break of the day Jenn signed copies of her book and spent time talking to every person in the queue.

Morning Workshop

The first workshop I had was with Rosie Garland (@rosieauthor) on ‘Silencing the internal critic’. As someone who listens to hers far too much (in all aspects of life sadly - not just writing) I felt I would get a lot out of this workshop, and Rosie certainly didn’t disappoint.

Notes:

Sometimes in order to move forwards you need to be willing to go backwards.

Be as kind to yourself as a mother who's toddler is learning to walk. You'd never say "you might as well stay down there" so don't tell yourself that.

Find your “crime scene”, the point in your life when your internal critic started speaking to you. - Despite my useless memory I felt I could pin-point this moment precisely to when my fiancé told me my writing aspirations were a silly dream that nothing would ever come of.

Start to recognise 'The Script'. What does the internal critic say? Once you figure out what the scrip is you can go "off script" and start taking control. The key is knowing the difference between being kind to yourself and sabotaging yourself.

One of the things I said to Rosie was that my internal critic's most frequent way of making me feel like crap is to say 'you'll never be able to write like X', 'you'll never be as good as them so why bother'. Rosie's advice here was "comparison is the thief of joy".

If you've done it (good writing) before you can do it again.

We each have an internal critic and an internal editor. The editor will speak to you about changes you could make to improve your writing, helpful things. Whereas the critic only says bad things. You need to be able to tell the difference in these two and know to always ignore the critic.

Rosie also told us to remember that the first draft is you telling yourself the story. It’s the sketch that lives under the painting. It’s the starting blocks to give you something to build on. Writing is a craft. It's a skill that you learn and develop, so if you don't do it you can't get better at it.

Remember that the books you love are published, edited, finished works. Don't judge yourself on that. They all had first drafts that would have been very different to the finished works.

Google the drama triangle (not done this yet) - your internal critic is the persecutor in this scenario.

One way to battle the internal critic is to give it a name. It makes it more physical and easier to push away. If you name it, it's not you, it's them. Humorous names are good too as they'll make the critic seem even more ridiculous. It's kind of magical that giving it a name means you take away it's power. This of course made me think of the end of Labyrinth "You have no power over me".

It's liberating to defeat the critic. It teaches you that you can live with what scares you. "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional".

Finally if your critic is shouting, you're more likely to be on the right path. 

Afternoon Workshop

The second workshop on day 1 was ‘Making Art is hard and that’s okay’ a zine workshop for wannabes, imposters and would be creatives with Sasha de Buyl-Pisco (@sashadebuyl).

I didn't take any notes from this workshop as it was more about just getting on and creating something. As such, my finished zine stands as my notes for this one.

Closing Keynote

We finished the day with a ‘Path to Publication’ Panel chaired by Jane Bradley (@forbookssake), and featuring the aforementioned Rosie Garland and Grrrl Con organiser and novelist Claire Askew (@onenightstanzas), alongside poet and playwright Afshan Lodhi (@ashlodhi).

Lots of talk on what the path looked like for them (clue - it was very different for each of them), and sage words of advice and encouragement for us all. Most notably to enter competitions, send your stories to magazines etc. Rejection will happen but the more you put your work out there the bigger chance you have to get published.  

My take away words of wisdom were “You can only have a first book once, so make sure it’s ready.”