HNS conference: I’m on my way … almost. And big news for Android users.

This past week has been even more crazed than usual. (If such a thing is possible in Art and Words land.) But much of my busy-ness was in preparation for this weekend’s Historical Novel Society conference, which I’m attending for the first time. Now that I’m deep into revision land for THE LILY MAID, the timing couldn’t be better in some ways. I’m excited to see friends such as Mary Sharratt and Chris Gortner in person. I’m also thrilled that I’ll have the opportunity to meet authors such as Michelle Moran and Margaret George. (I’ll do my best not to go all fan girl.) As well, I’ll be signing DOOMED QUEENS during a group book signing.

I’ll do my best to post an update on the conference upon my return next week. But in the meantime, I have some big news for Android users: the Goddess Tarot app will soon be available for your phones and tablets. We’re doing our best to keep the app as similar as possible to the iPhone version. I hope that it will be on the market in July. This is a very major undertaking of resources, so I’m hoping it will be well-received! On a related note, the iPad version is still under development. I hope to have concrete news about that soon.

There’s lots more stuff going on—novel-writing workshops, travel planning, kindergarten graduations, and more. While I’m away, the gallery will be closed to the public and all that. But first things first: I still need to pack clothes and print out chapters and pack books. So to be continued next week!

• Filed under The Novel, art and words, creativity, iPhone apps, studio and gallery, travels | 2 Responses

Gallery events this weekend: Creative Women’s Salon and Children’s Art Show closing

This is a busy weekend at my studio gallery! We have two great events planned. If you live in the NYC area, I hope you’ll join us!

Friday, June 10, 7-9:30 pm
CREATIVE WOMEN’S NETWORKING SALON
Suggested donation for refreshments: $5.

As featured on Brooklyn Independent Television! Are you an artist, writer, or creative entrepreneur and practioner? Come out and meet other like-minded women for conversation, inspiration, and wine. At our previous gatherings, we were joined by photographers, crafters, publishing people, designers, artists, writers, and illustrators. Watch a television clip about this event.

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Sunday, June 12, 1-4 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION:
THE ART OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS:
Inspiration to Illustration
free admission – children welcome

Please join us for the closing of this wonderful exhibit. We’ll have cookies and other kid-friendly goodies. Also available: autographed books and prints for sale!

About this exhibit: Everyone has a favorite picture book from their childhood. But have you ever wondered at how the art for these gorgeous books are created? The Art of Children’s Books: Inspiration to Illustration offers a behind-the-scenes look at the art, design, and production of illustrated books. It presents a wide variety of art techniques and styles—from the witty digital art of Sara Varon to the soft classicism of Donna Diamond, and beyond.

Butterfly Inkblot art: © Margaret Peot.

• Filed under art and words, creativity, events, studio and gallery, the world around me | No Comments

Creativity Friday: Breakout novel-writing with Donald Maass

As I wrote in Monday’s post, this past weekend I attended the Backspace Writers’ conference. The conference was split into three days with the first devoted to workshopping our novel queries and first pages with literary agents. The second day offered panels about various aspects of publishing—from novel genres to self-publishing and beyond. As wonderful as the conference was so far, Backspace saved the best for last: the final day was a WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL intensive with literary agent and novel-writing guru Donald Maass.

True confession time: I’m unable to resist most novel-writing “how to” books, no matter how sublime or silly their premises sound. While most don’t live up to their promises, I’m happy as long as I walk away with one new insight. That written, of all those I’ve read, Donald Maass’s guides are among the créme de la créme. I especially love THE FIRE IN FICTION—his section on microtension has been deeply helpful to me as I revise my novel. So you imagine how thrilled I was to have the opportunity to workshop my novel with him in person.

The full day workshop was a transformative experience. I loved it! I know The Novel (aka THE LILY MAID) is going to be so much richer for all the techniques and ideas I’ve gained during that whirlwind of a day. I now have tons of new ideas for pushing my writing to the next level.

Donald Maass was very different in person than I expected. For some reason, I expected him to have a rather serious and intimidating demeanor. Instead, he was lively, hilarious, and rather mischievous—elven almost—as he pushed the hundred or so writers in his workshop through eight solid hours of writing prompts, revision techniques, and other creativity-inspiring exercises to deepen our novel. By the end of the day, my hand was sore from so much writing. (Though I could have used a laptop, I like to write notes by hand in my journal and then transcribe them, editing as I go.) As a plus, he kindly autographed copies of his books for myself and my critique partner. Mine was inscribed “Tension on every page!”—a quote from THE FIRE IN FICTION. I was thrilled.

I took in so much inspiration that I hope you’ll forgive me for bullet-pointing some highlights of the workshop—I can’t possibly include everything here.

~ In brief, the morning was devoted to character development—developing our protagonist, antagonist, and secondary characters. The afternoon was centered around story levels, plot development, and developing microtension. He told us, “It is very rare that a story takes us someplace we didn’t expect. Push your story further than you think. Torture your characters, your protagonist.” Then he added, “Think you’re being mean? Don’t worry: They’re not real.” Everyone laughed.

~ Protagonists: One point Maass emphasized over and over: Most successful protagonists are highly conflicted. Building inner conflict, or microtension, helps to create highly memorable characters. Enacting duality gets the reader involved by making them yearn to resolve the protagonist’s inner conflict. To see them find happiness.

~ Antogonists: Maass pushed us to develop our antagonists—the force/s in opposition to our protagonist. He suggested writing what he called an antagonist outline. To do so, you assume your novel is the antagonist’s story: What is their central problem? What does your antagonist want? What do they want to change? What do they do? What is their arc? Inner conflict? What are their larger-than-life moments? How do things comes to a head for them? How do things turn around?

~ Narrative trends: Maass has noticed a narrative trend in publishing where the author marries literary fiction values with commercial fiction plot. This encourages great storytelling with beautiful writing. Surprise, surprise: Most of the bestsellers on the New York Times list are books with literary overtones—not potboilers where THE DaVINCI CODE meets John Grisham.

~ Plot layers: We spent a lot of time discussing how to add plot layers to our novels—not subplots, which usually involve secondary characters interacting with your protagonist. Plot layers add subtext and richness to your novel since they invite emotional complexity and microtension, which keeps readers turning the page. They usually introduce another conflict, or problem, which complicated the main plotline of your novel for your protagonist.

~ Secondary emotions: He also suggested adding secondary emotions to action, violence, or sex scenes. Maass said that usually readers tune out during these high drama scenes since they tend to be by-the-numbers in terms of emotions described. For example, arousal during sex; anger during violence. To help push our scenes to the next level, he asked us to choose four moments during an action sequence. We broke these down into snapshots, finding the unexpected image or emotional reaction within it. To focus on those instead. For example, one writer described having difficulties deciding on a secondary emotion for a scene in which his protagonist discovers his wife with another man. “I can’t think of anything beyond anger and disappointment.” Maass conjectured, “Perhaps he also feels relief because he’s suspected her of infidelity.”

I can’t wait to bring these techniques into my own writing!

• Filed under The Novel, creativity, publishing | 3 Responses

Publishing Monday: Why literary agents reject

These past few weeks have been very intense for me. I injured my knee running four weeks ago seriously enough that I had extremely limited mobility. Think hobbling with a cane, being unable to sleep because of discomfort. This is a test for anyone, but especially for a New Yorker — we rely on our feet and mass transit to get everywhere. For the first time in my life living here, I had to rely on a car to get places. Even walking a block was problematic at best. And I have a six-year-old child who needs to be walked to school, picked up, and so on. Not easy. Or fun.

As emotionally frustrating and physically painful as the experience has been — I’m an extremely self-sufficient person and I hate pain — there have been some blessings. I’ve been very touched by the concern everyone has shown me in my community. I swear I couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking how my knee was or offering to help me in some way. My husband truly rocked in taking care of the all the things I couldn’t, such as dropping off our daughter at school. And last but not least, being so immobilized forced me to concentrate deeply on revising THE LILY MAID (aka The Novel) in time for various writing workshops and conferences: Backspace Writers, Sackett Street Writers, and the Historical Fiction Society, where I’m planning to workshop my first chapter.

This past weekend was the Backspace Writer’s conference here in NYC. (Some readers might recall that I was awarded a scholarship for THE LILY MAID based on my query synopsis and first pages — a real honor and a thrill.) The short version: The conference was deeply transformative to me as a novelist. What I like about Backspace is that they offer both creative development as well as professional advice about the publishing industry. I left the conference buzzing with ideas for how to apply everything I learned to THE LILY MAID. I know my novel will be so much stronger now.

In the spirit of the Backspace motto of “writers helping writers”, I’ll share some of the lessons learned at their conference. There was so much that I’ll be splitting it into several posts.

First off, the conference was split into three days with the first devoted to workshopping our novel queries and first pages with literary agents. Though I’m fortunate to have a wonderful agent (I’ve been with Theresa for the past decade), it was extremely enlightening to get other agents’ feedback on my work. In addition, I’ve gained a new appreciation for everything that literary agents do. Not that I didn’t have it before, but it was still eye-opening. The second day offered panels about various aspects of publishing — from novel genres to self-publishing and beyond. The final day was a very intense nine hour writing workshop with novel-writing guru and literary agent Donald Maass.

My post today is about what literary agents look for when they’re reading unsolicited submissions. This lesson was brought home during the first day’s workshops which paired groups of fifteen writers with two literary agents according to genre. For example, I was placed in the commercial and historical fiction workshop, but other groups included young adult, fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction. In the morning session, we read our query letters out loud to our group; each agent critiqued and commented on them individually. While this session was informative, the afternoon session was where things got extremely lively. That’s where we workshopped the first two pages of our novels with two new agents; in my case, Jeff Kleinman and Nicholas Croce, who were brutally honest while managing to be witty, insightful, and entertaining. A difficult task.

My favorite Jeff Kleinman quote: “I’m a lazy agent. I’m looking for any excuse to stop reading your submission to make life easier for me.” Which may sound harsh until you consider that most literary agents receives several hundred unsolicited book submissions a week! This “slush pile” reading is in addition to all of the work a literary agent does on behalf of their current clients who are relying on them to keep their careers growing. Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?

The first pages workshops were set up so that another writer read our pages out loud; we all had hard copies to read along. An agent would halt the reading once they’d decided to reject the novel  – a novelist’s version of the Gong Show meets American Idol but with two Simon Cowells, no Paula Abdul. Some people got less than a paragraph, others half-way through. Only three got the full read.

The experience was hair-raising as well as edifying. As the workshop progressed, my heart thumped in my chest in anticipation for when an agent would call out, “Stop here.” The good news: once the call was made, each agent would spend time explaining their reasons for rejection — an opportunity to learn and revise.

The three main reasons for rejection were a lack of narrative urgency, an underdeveloped narrative voice, or a weak command of the English language — grammar or spelling issues. Here are others:

1. Passive writing. (She could see the green light in the distance. Suddenly a car appeared in front of her out of nowhere.)

2. Misuse of dialogue tags, especially over-the-top ones accompanied by modifiers. (“Wait for me!” she blurted out dramatically in a searing voice.)

3. Inappropriate use of analogy that didn’t reflect the protagonist’s experiences or relate to the story. This connoted an underdeveloped voice.

4. Oh, here’s a good one: Both agents brought up certain novel openings which they consider red flags. For example, dream openings because they see so many of them. They also distrust shock value openings where people are killed or commit suicide — usually they’re not well handled so they don’t feel emotionally involved — or openings where someone shouts things connoting action without cause. They also dislike static openings where people think over their situation as they drink coffee or tea. Passive exposition at its worst.

So, you might be wondering how I fared. Well, very well! I was one of the three writers who got a full read.

On Friday, I plan to post about Donald Maass’s workshop, which was based on his book WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL. I hope you’ll check back!

• Filed under The Novel, publishing | 7 Responses

Creativity Friday: The studio et moi on tv

The segment on Kris Waldherr Art and Words, my little studio-gallery in the heart of Brooklyn, aired this week on Brooklyn Independent Television. I’m relieved that it came out so well. And it was fun to participate in too thanks to Clive Salmon and his talented crew.

The segment is six minutes long and features the Creative Women’s Networking Salon. Which reminds me: I need to schedule the next one for June soon!

• Filed under art and words, studio and gallery, the art world, the world around me | One Response