Writing Craft Recap for August

I have declared 2012 my year to learn the writing craft better. And once a month, generally on the first Thursday of the month, I will share some of the highlights of what I've learned.

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I spent August soaking in the amazingly helpful, incredibly wonderful Bestseller Society - run by writing gurus Jeff Gerke, Mary DeMuth, and Thomas Umstattd. They call the site a writers conference in a box - and it is an ABSOLUTELY apt description. Audio and video classes on just about every aspect of fiction and nonfiction writing and marketing you could possibly want. I listened to/watched twenty-five different sessions on everything from the first fifty pages to dialogue to memoir to using fiction techniques in your nonfiction. If you can become a member, I truly cannot recommend it more highly.

And if you can't, just check out some of what I learned there, as well as from a few writing magazines.

From The Bestseller Society:

• Often, when a book is published, only one person at the publishing house has actually read the entire book.   
• When writing your first draft, dismiss the angry English teacher from your shoulder.
• People are generally either plot-first or character-first novelists - and generally which ever one they start with, they're not so good at the other.
• Myers-Briggs is a great way to create a complex character.
• The three easiest ways to get your fiction manuscript rejected are telling and not showing, POV errors, and weak characters.
• Description is not telling (as in "show don't tell")
• Most readers come to fiction hoping for a movie in their head.
• You are your voice - you are not somebody else's.
• Memoir is retelling our story to ourselves.
• The key of great writing is enticement: leave things out - enticing the reader all the way through until the "payoff" later in the book.
• Fiction is about watching someone navigate a change.
• The purpose of your story is to take your main character on his/her inner journey.
• It takes ten thousand hours to establish yourself as a genius in something.
• Your worth should not be tied to your work.
• Failure does not automatically equal disobedience or sin. Failure is an important component of our lives - some lessons only failure can teach
• Creating your plot is building the stage your character will change on.
• The question to ask which will fix most telling is: Can the camera see it? (a couple others - can the microphone hear it? Can the senses pick it up?)
• What makes a great writer is the village surrounding that writer – the people who are with you on your publishing journey. 
• The first fifty pages of your book must engage your reader and set up the rest of the book.
• Your story basically begins when your MC steps on stage - anything before that is a de-facto prologue. 

From the August and September Issues of The Writer:

• Discipline, however it looks, is more important than writing every day.
• We want to read about people who are more energetic, more motivated, and more driven than the average person.
• This book looks WAY too fun!
• A symbolic object in your story can represent something larger than itself and can be a shortcut to theme.

Good stuff, eh? Watch for my post NEXT month, when I feature, among other things, what I learn from the free ACFW course Plodding vs. Plotting.

Questions? Comments? Observations? What was most interesting/helpful to you?

Traveling Rough Roads With God's Strength