MWW Day 2, Of Queries and Agents

On the second day of the writer’s workshop, stress levels were high (i.e. my stress levels) and because of this two out of the four breakout sessions I would not attend. The workshop coordinators said the conference was meant to be casual, with people coming and going from sessions as they started or finished their evaluations and agent pitch assignments. But I knew that my mind would either not be with the presenter and their topic, or my mind would not be focused on the pitch session to come and I would really flub up the appointment with the agent.

Here is where I make a confession. My book is not yet finished. I’m about 10,000 words (my estimation) shy of completion. I’ve been working on it over the summer, revising some parts of it too, but there’s a gap right before I get to my final scene. I felt so bad about this that I almost considered contacting the MWW coordinators and telling them to give my agent slot to someone else. You see, rule #1 when pitching an agent (other than not to touch them or stalk them in the bathroom — Kelsey Timmerman’s advice) is “have a finished manuscript.” But in the days leading to the conference, I began to think about it more. A workshop is about learning, so what the heck, why not try it — knowing that I’m probably not going to get a positive response.

I had researched the agents scheduled to be there, and most of them were looking for YA (young adult) manuscripts, which mine definitely is not. I know YA is big right now, but it’s not my cup of tea. I was very honored to meet with Kathleen Ortiz, currently part of the Nancy Coffey Literary agency, and whose interests are very close to my own. She gave me some very good suggestions for improving my query letter and pitch. I suppose it didn’t help that my pitch was scheduled before her session that afternoon called “Perfect Your Pitch.” Cest la vie. I did say it was all about the learning, right? As it turned out, many of the attending writers that I spoke to during lunch were pitching incomplete manuscripts just for the learning experience. The silver lining here is that I came away more confident in my query letter skills and knowing what things will (0r won’t) get an agent into reading the manuscript (which is what the game is all about). All of the agents at the conference were awesome people, and the Agent Panel that met first thing Friday morning was one of the best sessions I attended over the weekend.

My one-on-one manuscript evaluation came later in the day, and it was one more thing in a string of events that led me to believe I should be getting my material out there. I don’t know that I was necessarily looking for a confidence  booster going into the conference, but I certainly had received several of them by the time I had left.

Later in the evening was fun stuff: a pizza party combined with a writing competition. After that, while the judges deliberated the winning entry, was the Message in the Bottle reading event. Having read my material in front of an audience before, I was looking forward to this. My name wasn’t drawn though (due to time constraints), but it was still fun to hear the other writers read their material.

Afterward I went back to my hotel room and crashed relatively early, happy that my “big” responsibilities were behind me. Tomorrow, the last day of the workshop, I planned to take full advantage of ALL the sessions and really concentrate on the craft of my writing. And boy, would things end on a high note! More to come…

- t.c.

MWW Day 1, “Colorful Language”

I decided to take a big leap with my writing commitment by attending the Midwest Writer’s Workshop this past weekend (see link on sidebar).

For the uninitiated, most of Thursday is Part I, the intensive sessions, where attendees spend a couple hours before and after lunch engaged with a single topic. The one I went to was the Manuscript Makeover with Holly Miller and Dennis Hensley. It was incredibly valuable, but with 20 people in the workshop, it took a lot of time to go over each person’s writing (I am glad that I also signed up for the one-on-one manuscript evaluation on Saturday as well). It was fascinating to look at what other people were writing, and so I learned a bunch not only from my own manuscript being reviewed, but from everyone else’s as well. Dennis and Holly were excellent co-presenters as Dennis has an excruciating eye for detail (even as an English teacher, I wish I could line edit my work as well as he did), and Holly has a good mind for characters. Together they showed just how subjective writing/reading can be, as they were not afraid to disagree with each other on several points. One of their disagreements happened to be with my manuscript in particular…

“Colorful language” Dennis called it. In other words, cursing. Certain characters in my book curse. A couple of them curse quite a bit. The cursing is there not as shock value, but simply because those characters are supposed to curse, a way to (hopefully) make outrageous and fantastical people more realistic. In the end, it was a good discussion with lots of valid points.

The opening session of Part II of the conference came later that evening. Kelsey Timmerman was the presenter, and if you’ve never heard Kelsey before, let me say he is one of the coolest dudes on the planet, a self-professed underwear journalist who credits MWW as the source of his success because he met his literary agent there a few years ago. You can find his website here.

After the session that evening, I went back to the hotel to relax. Friday would be a big day, I realized, having to pitch my book to a literary agent as well as the one-on-one manuscript evaluation. I had been revising the one-page synopsis all summer long, but I had not yet written a query letter, nor had I decided on what my two sentence pitch would be. My brain was so busy thinking about these things that I didn’t get to bed until 12:30, which is late for me. But I went to bed relatively satisfied with both. Having to put together the query package really caused me to streamline what my book is about, helping me to see through some holes that I knew were there, but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Next time, Day 2!

- t.c.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Writing is supposed to be fun, easy, right? What happened from the time I was a kid and my favorite thing to do was sit down with a pencil and a notebook and write down the stories from my head, to now?

I’ve been faced with a couple of real writing challenges of late, one of which I may have mentioned previously, is re-plotting the last third of my novel. I was in such a rush to get it done earlier this year that I had let all the crazy words just flow out of my head and onto the page with little to no discrimination. Now I’m pulling all those words apart and rebuilding from scratch. Honestly, that hasn’t been as daunting a job as I’ve made it out to be. I’m trying not to even look at what I had done before and am rebuilding it. Not looking at it has made it easier to make cuts, redo my outlines and then rewrite new scenes.

The second item is writing a synopsis for my book so I can take that to the writing conference this week. I may have mentioned this previously as well. In the past couple of weeks I have rewritten my synopsis two more times. And then one more time (my writing group gave me a critique of the two, and then I did a rewrite of it again from their comments; thanks guys!). I think my synopsis is coming along nicely now and I have it almost done. All I know is that I don’t hate it nearly as much as I did before.

Speaking of the writing conference, I will be blogging about my experiences there throughout the rest of the week, starting Thursday, so hopefully you will see a bit more action on this blog in a couple of days!

- t.c.

June… the worst month for writing?

As my school year closed with the high schoolers, I began thinking of the blessed time that is summer, with so much potential for working on projects (writing, gaming, doing things inside/outside the house). Of course, with this in mind, I am reminded of last June when my writing group tried to do WriDaNoJu (write a damn novel in june) and every single one of us committed an epic fail. As it turned out, June was a god awful month for writing. I should have learned my lesson then.

I don’t know if it’s because one week of laziness begets another, until pretty soon it’s no longer June but July, but the first month of summer stinks for writing. I have been anything but lazy so far this June, having finished a number of projects outside the house in the first week, so this year I can’t blame it on laziness. But it IS only the first week of summer. I have the coming week to prove to myself that I can get the writing machine going.

Why? Because I have a book to finish. At my best estimate, I am two-thirds of my way through the novel I began back in November. The deadline I have set for myself, getting this book done, is the end of July. The end of July is the Midwest Writer’s Workshop, and it would be an incredible opportunity for me to have my latest book done by then.

In the meantime, I plan on producing more content for this blog. I realize that, despite my best plans, I have been inattentive with it the past month or two. Hopefully I can correct that.-

- t.c.

Summarize this!

I finished writing a one page synopsis of my novel this weekend, and by far it has been the most painful piece of writing I’ve ever done. How does a person whittle down the plot of a 100,000 word novel to a single page?

The first time out I managed to keep it to two pages. Not too bad, I thought, but it was a lot of explaining this and explaining that. If I was to get the plot cut down by another page, a lot of the explaining would have to go. This morning, I looked at the two pages, printed out, and then began cutting every little thing that I could, deciding to leave out many of the subplots I had built in, and keeping the summary to just the main character. After I was finished, I had it to one page, but I couldn’t believe that all the work I had done in fleshing out characters and subplots had been left out. It felt so… flimsy.

I received my validation, however, when my wife read my one page synopsis and said “I would read this book.” But when I gave her my two pager, she couldn’t even finish it.

So what’s next? This week I need to fine tune the synopsis and my 1000 word manuscript sample and send them in. My hope is to get one of nine spots in a Fellowship at a writer’s retreat in May. Those nine lucky writers get to spend some quality one-on-one time with three veteran writers and editors in the industry. What have I got to lose? All they can say is “no.”

- t.c.

Cracking the Whip

Now that I’ve managed to be a bit more productive with my writing the past couple of weeks, it’s time to really kick it into gear. Make sure to write every day.

I’ve got a couple different irons in the fire at the moment, so I thought I’d take a moment this week to mention my writing projects, as if saying them out loud (or publishing them on a blog) will make them all the more true. Perhaps I’ll feel more guilty when I don’t complete them (nah!).

#1. The Book Project. I need to finish the book I began in November. I have 53K words of it done, but the second 25,000 or so are a complete mess. I also need to finish the second 50K words of it, because the novel was only half done at the end of last November. One of my first jobs in getting back to this task, is to work on a plot synopsis that will help me sort out some of the mess I got into back in November.

#2. The Short Story Project. I want to finish editing one of the short stories that my writing group looked at some time ago. I’d like to submit it to a magazine, and I’m looking around for one to submit it to.

#3. The Collaboration project. Some of the members of my writing group are working on a collection of short stories, that hopefully, sometime down the road (this year?) we hope to self publish. So far, I have a good idea for the story and have most of it plotted in my head. I just need to sit down and write it out. I’ve tried writing portions of it, and it has served as a good break in between sessions of editing my other work. And lets face it, it’s good to take a break from the monotony of that.

I’ve gotten to the point in my life (i.e. I’m enough of an “old fart”) that I want to make sure that I finish things, even if the idea doesn’t pan out and it is not very good. I’ve started far too many projects in my life to count, and even though my wife might refute this, I do (now) try to complete the things I begin. I have good intentions anyway. So when I speak of the “book project” or the “short story project” or the “collaboration project” (all of which will someday be named here) people will have some idea of which I speak.

The next few months will prove to be stressful (the fun kind of stress) where writing is concerned. I’ve got several submission deadlines coming up. One is a competition for a writing fellowship (part of a writer’s retreat in May). Another event coming up is a writer’s conference (MWW) in July. I have signed up for the manuscript makeover session, a one-on-one manuscript evaluation, as well as an appointment with a literary agent where I will get to pitch my book idea. There are also two writing contests that are a part of MWW that each have separate deadlines, and I will be submitting entries for each of those.

Can’t wait! I’ll be sure to keep posting news of these upcoming things here.

- t.c.

The Case of the Horrible, No-Good, Flawed Character

I made it back to my writer’s group meeting today. I had missed it the past couple of weeks due to illness and other family obligations. It’s always a good meeting that makes me want to go home and write after reviewing and helping someone else with their work. And I did get behind the screen for a little while today, which felt good.

And while I was out driving, and listening to music (which is always a sure fire way of inspiring me to write), an idea sprang to mind.

No, I’m not going to go into the specifics of it here. Not now.

But as I was working on this new material today — what I hope will become a piece for the group’s collaborative project, a topic I’ll have to save for another post — it occurs me that lately most of my characters are not very admirable. What happened to the heroes?

I used to love the archetypal hero. I’d write stories all the time with them as the main character. But somewhere along the line they became boring to me.

I’m not sure I like where my imagination is taking me, though. I’m not talking about a character with a minor flaw. My characters of late seem to be full of odious tendencies, hateful stereotypes, and do despicable things. I find myself wondering, if I do get any of this material published, will people think of me as a sexist, racist, anti-religious sod who spends his time thinking about death and torture and other cruel acts?

Honestly, that’s not me.

But my characters? Where does one draw the line in the name of artistic integrity or just plain consistency?

Somehow I need to NOT get sucked into the darkness of it all. I need to think about what I want to be known for (if indeed, I’m known for anything). My inner world might be dark for a little while, but in the end I hope that “hope” still prevails.

Here’s hoping that I can let some of it shine in my stories, too.

- t.c.