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.

A Letter To 13 Year Old Me

Anyone who has been watching the gripping adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will know what the words in this picture mean. For everyone else, it means "don't let the bastards grind you down".

This seemed like the perfect quote to give to 13 year old me. 

This letter all came about because of Grrrl Con. Yes I promise I will stop talking about it at some point, but I think you need to understand that going to that series of workshops has given me something back that has crippled me for years.

On the last day of the weekend at Grrrl Con, I did a workshop with Cheryl Martin called 'Every Grrrl Has A Story'. In said workshop Cheryl asked us to think about a moment in our lives when everything changed. For the better, for worse, whatever. Just a moment that we thought of that we could elaborate on.

The stories that came out of that session were fantastic, and each very different as you would expect. One grrrl wrote about the moment she came out to her best friend, which was sweet but also really funny. Another wrote about an encounter she was convinced she had with a ghost when she was very little, putting us in the mind of a very young child made the story so chilling. We also heard the story of one of the grrls realising she was attracted to women for the first time, which was really heartfelt and beautiful. 

I don't know why really but when Cheryl gave us the criteria from which to write, only one scenario came to my mind. The day the bullies finally broke me.

It had been going on since primary school. I was an easy target I suppose. Small, thin, pale. I came from a broken home, mum and dad divorced, dad wasn't around much, and certainly not on the money front. Mum had three kids to raise, one of which has learning difficulties, and only benefits to do it on. She had to give up her job when my sister nearly burnt the house down (by accident). 

My clothes were mostly second hand. I had lank hair because we only had a bath at home and mum couldn't afford for us to bathe every day. I was pushed around, hair pulled, names called, spat on. The worst was when the boys would put their clammy hands up my skirt as I waited in line for lunch. Yeah, school sucked big time. 

I wasn't beaten up no. I had no bruises. But that doesn't mean that I didn't feel the words they shouted at me as if they were daggers. I hate that old saying about sticks and stones. Names DO hurt me. They still hurt me when I look in the mirror and hear those bullies as clearly as if they were standing behind me now. 

In a lot of ways I hate them more now than I did back then because they changed my life. And not in a good way. They made me leave school. They pushed and pushed until I could take it no more.

I'd snapped once before the fateful day I left school. Four years before, when I was still at Primary school. I'd screamed at a boy in sheer frustration. No words, no retorts, just aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh.

The boy the scream was directed at later told the teacher that I'd thrown a desk at him. Ha. Me. Tiny, mouse-like, wouldn't say boo to a goose, 4ft something, 6 stone, Kath. Threw a desk. I'll let that sink in.

Thankfully the teachers thought it was as preposterous as it sounded and no punishment was levied. It should have been though, against him. He deserved having a desk thrown at him. Maybe that's why I now have a love of female superheroes. And like to cosplay as them. It's for 10 year old me who was only strong enough to scream. 

So it carried on, for four more years. I moved to secondary school. Maybe it'll be better there? Not when most of the kids who picked on you at primary school are coming with you to high school. 

The worst thing about it was that mum was the only one who believed it was happening to me. Teachers told me not to tell tales when I was crying for help. I tried to talk to my dad and stepmum about it. Their response was that "things like that didn't really happen." Oh right. Good to know.

I honestly don't remember the exact day when it happened. When I eventually broke. But I do remember the moment when I walked out of school and never came back.

I was waiting in line for my music lesson when one of the kids who frequently bullied me said something in passing. I remember that he was shorter than me, and ginger, but I don't remember his name or what it was that he said. I don't even think it was particularly hurtful, just something stupid. But it was enough. It was the final straw that broke the camel's back as it were.

I said nothing in response, possibly for the first time ever, I just walked out. Out of the school, out of the grounds, through the little break in the hedge that the students used as a shortcut. Nobody tried to stop me or asked where I was going.

When I arrived home more than an hour early mum knew something was wrong. But being mum she made the decision that I would never be going back there. From then on I was entered into a home schooling programme. It wasn't actually that I was home schooled, that's just what it was called. It was two hours a day in a community center with kids like me, or kids that were pregnant, or kids who were also carers and who couldn't go to school.

I took five exams at the end of the two years I spent there, and I'm still in touch with my teachers from the home schooling. They, along with my mum, literally saved my life.

And yeah I might not have GCSE's. I might not have been able to step into a classroom environment until many years later. I might not have gone to college or uni, and I might now have a very average job, all because I didn't finish school. I might also be emotionally scarred. But it was what I needed to do for my own sanity.

Would I change it if I could? No. I often say that I wish I could go back and finish school. And that's true. I do wish that. My prospects would have been much brighter if I had. But I would not want to have endured one more second in that place. It was literally sucking the life out of me. And maybe leaving, making that choice, and sticking to it, has made me who I am today. And I like her. She might still hear the bullies taunting her when she looks in the mirror, but she is kind, and thoughtful and considerate of others, and she values her friends above all other things. And that makes her pretty cool in my eyes.

So, 13 year old me, my advice to you is to be strong. It will get better. You will find your people, you will find your voice, and you will get through this.