2014 IWC Half-Day Conference: Call for Presenters

Indiana Writers’ Consortium (IWC) is pleased to announce the extension of its annual networking dinner to include an intimate, high quality, and affordable half-day writers’ conference on October 11, 2014. The conference, which will take place at the Hilton Garden Inn in Merrillville, Indiana, will include multiple breakout sessions and be followed by a dinner and keynote address by Barbara Shoup, author of seven novels, executive director of Indiana Writers Center, associate editor of OV Books, and an associate faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

 

IWC seeks proposals from individuals and groups who are at different stages in their writing careers that will represent a broad range of perspectives and experiences. Presentations may include topics such as:

 

• Writing and craft
• Business of publishing
• Creative writing pedagogy
• Academic and community program development
• Genre trends

Interactive individual presentation, four-to-five person panels, creative writing workshops, and round table discussions are welcome.

 

Submission Instructions:

 

Deadline: May 1, 2014

 

Submit:  A 250-word abstract that includes the session title, description, format, and presenter names. Each presenter should include a 50-word bio and .jpg photo.

 

Submit to: indianawritersconsortium@gmail.com. Please indicate “IWC Half-day Conference Proposal” in the subject line.

 

Questions may be directed to:  Janine Harrison at: indianawritersconsortium@gmail.com.

 

Indiana Writers' Consortium inspires and builds a community of creative writers. We are dedicated to educating writers through speakers, seminars, and children's programs.  IWC provides educational and networking opportunities for writers in all stages of their careers.  We are a nonprofit organization incorporated in Indiana in 2008 and a public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code.

Opening the Door for Community: Turn the Knob Recap!

by

Kayla Greenwell

 

In case you missed it (I'm so sorry if you did) here is the rundown of the very first Turn the Knob Adult Writing Workshop.  The event started a little after noon on Saturday, January 25, 2014 and the participants ranged from already published novelists to creative writing professors to aspiring comic book creators.  Although the attendees had different backgrounds and varying levels of success they all had one thing in common that made this event such a success: a passion for writing.  Keynote speaker Kirk Robinson, an Assistant Professor of English at Calumet College of St. Joseph, spoke of community. It grows as we grow, he said, and it may start very small, but it is always important.  Community is priceless to a writer and that is what this event reflects. When you turn the knob, you open a door and through that door is a community of writers waiting to help you and support you while you achieve your dreams.

Kirk Robinson (center) discussing community. (Picture by Kathryn Page Camp)

 

After Professor Robinson's uplifting and pen-spurring speech, the group split into the first two sessions.  There was a choice between a poetry session run by Blotterature Literary Magazine Editor Tim Murray, "Why did I get here? The Poetics of All-Inclusiveness"—which I heard from Tim involved hand turkeys—and a fiction session, "It's the Little Things that Getcha: Using Comic Detail to Create Vivid Characters" by Up Jumps the Devil author Michael Poore. Poore discussed giving your characters low impact, humanizing moments to make them more approachable.  "It is in these small moments where you learn the most about your character," he said.

Michael Poore reading aloud during "It's the Little Things that Getcha." (Picture by Kathryn Page Camp)

  

After these two sessions there was a break for lunch, and Kirk Robinson and Michael Poore talked to the group about publishing.  Professor Robinson discussed publishing for poets and the importance of understanding the etiquette of the journal before submitting.  Both mentioned the golden of rule of reading the journal before sending your work to make sure your work is the right fit.  "You never want to regret being published, and so many people are," they said. In the end, after questions were answered, publishing sounds like a lot of luck and hard work, but hard work that is totally worth it in the end.  Both talked again about community, and how finding those few writers that you trust to cultivate your writing and be honest with you is so essential to your writing process.

Poore and Robinson talking 'bout publishing! (Picture by Kathryn Page Camp)

 

After this we were onto the final session. This time the participants had a choice between college writing instructor Gordon Stamper Jr.'s "Avoiding Greeting Card Verse: The Hallmark of Writing Poetry" and "The Short and the Short of It: The Art of Writing Flash Fiction" taught by Janine Harrison M.A., M.F.A.  Stamper Jr. said during the break that his aim was to help poets avoid the cheesiness of the hallmark card, unless that was what they were going for. "Then," he said, "more power to you!" Harrison's session focused around the craft of flash fiction—fiction that is 1500 hundred words or less, but is typically 500 words or less. It's harder than it sounds, but if you can master it, it is a powerful form of writing. Every word has a weight to it.



Gordon Stamper Jr. (right) leading "Avoiding Greeting Card Verse." (Picture by Kathryn Page Camp)

  

We ended the wonderful day of writing and community with more beautiful words from Kirk Robinson, who read his poem "The Design of To-Morrow."  Then the participants each chose a knob to take home as a memory of the day. Hopefully they will continue to work on their writing to submit to the Turn the Knob e-publication that will be go live on March 3, 2014.  Overall it was a fantastic and productive day. It was the perfect example of community.  There was talk of doing an event like this quarterly and everyone left in high spirits with new ideas and smiles on their faces.



Practicing What You Preach as a Writing Instructor

by

Gordon Stamper, Jr.

 

A few years ago, a fellow educator told me how she had resented her writing students.  They occupied what could have been her writing time with stacks of essays to grade.  How dare they complete their assignments!

Soon another, more carefully thought-out, realization came to her:  could she complete the writing work she assigned them, let alone achieve high marks?  The instructor felt hypocrisy in her expectations.  She had preoccupied herself with the career necessities of creating curriculum, writing prompts, and commenting on students’ essays, yet did not allocate any other time for her own writing, fiction or nonfiction.

A turning point came when she became a little selfish:  certain times of the week became her writing times, from a few “stolen” minutes to several hours.  From this came multiple creative nonfiction essays, short stories, and two novels.  And a positive byproduct of it was that she enjoyed teaching English and writing again.  By regaining her writing voice, she saw the importance and pleasures of helping her students gain theirs.

I went through a similar “crisis” over a decade ago.  Here I was, a composition and research writing teacher who had not written anything unrelated to school work in at least three years, and I felt burnt out and discouraged.  When I saw there were writers’ groups that met regularly in our region, I gave myself permission to write for them.

Of course, I was mostly writing for myself, but a veil lifted for me as I continued my pursuits.  There is hard work and joy in creation, and it is important to be a part of helping students—at least those willing to listen and work—discover that joy.   Yes, I can still get frustrated and even a bit infuriated with student writing, but my underlying resentment is gone.  I too am a fellow struggler in the writing craft.



Back It Up and Away--Part II

A TV commercial shows three men watching the news on an iPad they got from Dish Network when they signed up for the Hopper. The action starts in the kitchen, where the men listen to a female news anchor announcing that the kitchen may be the most dangerous room in the house. In the next scene, the men have moved to a tree house when the same anchor reports that a tree house is even more dangerous than a kitchen. The final scene has the three men under a bed and the anchorwoman saying, “Think you’re safe under a queen-size bed in the guest room? Well, you’re dead wrong.”

We can never be totally safe, and neither can our manuscripts. Still, documents have an advantage over people because text can be in several different places at the same time.

So what is the best way to back up your manuscripts?

Each solution has its problems. In the long run, the best response is to make sure you have a backup that is likely to survive if the original is lost.

Last week’s post mentioned the problem with storing the hard copy in the same office as the computer. If the computer crashes, the hard copy survives. But if there is a fire, both copies are gone.

One solution is to back up your manuscript to a thumb drive and carry it with you at all times. If you burn up in the fire, you probably won’t care about your unfinished book. But if you get out, your backup copy will, too. Of course, this isn’t always a good solution. Imagine taking a flash drive into the shower.

Or you could keep the thumb drive in your safe deposit box. Practical for completed manuscripts, but less so for your work in progress. Still, as long as you switch out the flash drives often enough, you will have a recent version to start from.

Another solution is to e-mail yourself a copy of the manuscript. Then it will be available on your e-mail server if something happens to your original.

Or you could back it up to a “cloud,” which may be similar to what happens when you e-mail it to yourself. As a non-techie, I don’t understand this concept very well. I have heard people say they don’t even keep a copy on their computer because they can always retrieve it from the cloud. But what if you lose Internet connectivity? And if your “cloud” is located on a remote server, it could crash. I have even heard horror stories about the government “seizing” servers operated by service providers who are suspected of encouraging copyright violations or other illegal behavior.

So what is the best way to back up your manuscripts? Do whatever works for you, but keep these two principles in mind:

(1) make sure you have at least one copy besides the “original,” and

(2) keep them far away from each other so that the same disaster won’t affect both.

Even though our manuscripts can never be totally safe, good planning can minimize the possibility of loss.

Back It Up and Away--Part I

Have you ever lost the only copy of your manuscript? A tragedy, yes, but also a lesson. So now you make a backup copy.

Safe!

Don’t be so sure.

Imagine that you have a hard copy sitting on your desk next to your computer. If your computer crashes, you still have the hard copy. It may be a pain to retype it, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch.

But what if your house burns down and melts the computer to an unrecognizable mess? The hard copy isn’t likely to survive, either.

Ernest Hemingway understood the value of backing up his manuscripts. In the days before computers, he made a carbon copy of each of his stories. That would have worked if they had been kept in two separate places. Or if his wife had understood the reason for a backup copy.

Hemingway tells the story in his book, A Moveable Feast. It was early in his career, and he and his wife, Hadley, were living in Paris and holidaying in Lausanne, Switzerland. Hadley decided to take Hemingway’s manuscripts along as a surprise so he could work on them during the holidays. She took the originals and the copies and put them all in her suitcase. Then someone stole the suitcase, and Hemingway’s manuscripts were gone.

I assume that both Hadley and Hemingway learned a valuable lesson about keeping the original separate from the backup.

The financial industry learned this same lesson on 9-11. It was already common practice to back up trading records and account documents, but some of the copies were only a few floors or a few blocks away. When the towers disintegrated, it didn’t matter how many floors separated the records. And even those records stored in a building down the street became inaccessible for days or weeks when the entire area was cordoned off.

So don’t keep the backup too close to the original. 

Join us next week for a post on how and where to back up your manuscripts.

Apprentices for Life: Writers and Craft

by

Janine Harrison

 

The romanticized, media-fueled image of the novelist entails a starving writer who, after facing writers block, is suddenly inspired to sit down at his typewriter (it is an old image, you see) and, working day and night, feverishly pounds out a novel, which is sent off in its entirety in a brown envelope to a single New York agent, who almost immediately sells it to one of the most reputed publishers in the city, and it becomes an instant best seller, earning top dollar.  (Simultaneously, said novelist gets his personal life together AND gets the girl, followed by, you guessed it, “happily ever after”). 

As a creative writing professor, I still have a couple of students each year who enter my intro course, intending to do just this.  Some have even prematurely self-published.  What is wrong is not lack of talent.  Often what separates the novice from the expert writer is what he or she does during the craft stage of writing. 

Although I have heard of a famous writer or two who was able to write publication-worthy material in a single draft, for most of us, writing involves damned hard work.  Ernest Hemingway once stated, “There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”  Writing, when done properly, should look easy, and to non-writers it does.  Some writers pre-write and then write.  Others confront the blank page with an idea at the ready and begin to draft.  Either way, the first or discovery draft is an adventure.  It is the time and place for writers to turn off their inner-critic, let words come alive on the page, and follow them.  Let the words take the scenic route, exploring rain forests and deserts, jungles and ocean depths, as they sojourn.  Let them make connections that are not consciously understood.  Let them exist unbroken. 

But after the writer has become hollow from the writing experience, has let the draft get cold, has returned to it with attitudes vacillating between ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever written—it’s bloody brilliant!’ to ‘Perhaps this is one for the circular file?’, it is only then that the real work begins.

What, then, is the real work—the work of craft?  Craft is the re-envisioning, the deepening, the addressing of global and local concerns, that characterizes drafts two through ???, until you, the writer, cannot make the piece any better or cannot stand to look at it another minute.  (Hopefully, those two events coincide.  If not, please walk away and return when you have regained some semblance of objectivity about the piece at hand and revise it until it is the best that you can do.) 

When I was a grad student, I once wrote a second or third ending for a story, which was again rejected by my creative writing professor, and in frustration, I asked, rather loudly, “How many endings do you expect me to write?”  The professor looked up from the paper he’d begun reading and replied simply, “Herman Melville rewrote the ending of Moby Dick 106 times.”  Perhaps he said 103?  Either way, that shut me up.  Craft is what makes bad writing better.  Decent writing good.  Good writing excellent.  Excellent writing exceptional.  And exceptional writing publishable.  And it takes time and effort to learn how to take writing from one stage to the next.  It is, in fact, a never-ending process. 



Writing Fireworks

Does your writing contain fireworks? Not literal fireworks, but does the text dazzle the reader and elicit oohs and aahs?

Adding fireworks to your writing takes hard work and dedication. But you also have to know the craft.

If you want your writing to explode in readers’ minds and hearts, you must understand what works—and what doesn’t. So where do you start?

Good writers start as good readers. Listen to the counsel of three authors who managed to make a living at it.

·         “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read and lot and write a lot.” Stephen King

·         “If you read good books, good books will come out of you.” Natalie Goldberg

·         “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Start by reading timeless literature and books in your genre. If you don’t know which books qualify, ask your librarian for help.

The library is also a good place to start when looking for books on writing, but so is this blog. Stay tuned for next week’s post, which will suggest a few classic writing books.