Last Friday and Saturday, November 2-3, 2018, I attended the Johnson County Library’s writing conference. We in the Kansas City area are very lucky to have excellent library systems in our area, and the Johnson County Library system is one of them. This two-day conference was free to anyone, whether a library card holder or not.
Here are the twenty points that resonated the most with me during this conference:
THE WRITING LIFE:
1: To write a novel, you need to have a reason to write it. You need to be committed to the idea, so that you’re willing to spend the time with it it takes to write 80,000+ words.
2: As a self-employed individual, plan your day ahead of time. Then hold yourself accountable for working your plan.
3: Writers need a community of other writers.
4: Look for critique partners who are better writers than you in some respects, but to whom you can also offer some help.
ON STORY GENERALLY:
5: Writing a compelling story requires writing something readers haven’t seen before. All stories have been told, so know what makes YOUR story unique.
6: To be a viable story, you need an idea with conflict and change. Usually the conflict is related to the change that happens in the story.
7: Fiction must make more sense than real life. In real life bad things happen to good people for no reason. There needs to be a reason in fiction.
ON CHARACTERS:
8: Characters are more important than plot. The stories you remember are the ones in which the characters grab your heart.
9: Know your characters—both their good and their bad. And understand how their good attributes can cause them problems and their bad traits can save them.
10: Readers have to care about your characters, even the villains.
11: Understand the distractions in your character’s life. What keeps them from solving their problem?
12: Your protagonist, and maybe other characters as well, must be changed by the conflict in the story.
ON PLOT & STORY STRUCTURE:
13: The Pixar “once upon a time” formula is a good way to start structuring your story: “Once upon a time, every day, one day, and because of that, and because of that, until finally, and ever since that day.”
14: Every good scene has conflict at its core — about 95-98% conflict (the conflict can be subtle, but it’s there)
15: Scenes are constructed of a scene goal, conflict developed through action and/or dialogue, and a scene-ending disaster
16: Every scene should end in failure — the character has not achieved what he or she wanted, or the goal if achieved comes with undesirable consequences.
MISCELLANEOUS
17: Even in an action story, the fights are less important than what happens before and after. Like sex scenes, fight scenes are less about who is doing what to whom than about how the character feels about it and what they hope to get out of it.
18: Where your story takes place is as important as the characters.
19: When editing, make sure every page contains description, dialogue, action, sensory and emotional details, and exposition.
20: All rules you read about writing can be broken.
I saved the best for last — Number 20 is my favorite tip. What’s yours?
