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.
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.
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