A note from Susie May: Alena Tauriainen is one of my favorite aspiring authors – she’s a hard worker, creative and has a heart to press on in this journey. She is also the MBT Retreats Hostess and writes a series for the MBT Blog called, “The Next Step,” about the small steps an aspiring author makes every day that add up to a finished novel. I asked her to blog today on her perspective on attending a writers conferences when you’re early in the journey. Thank you, Alena! ***** Many of my writing friends told me attending a writing conference was the next step on my writing journey. I shrugged them off. After all, I was learning to schedule time in to write, reading blogs and other various articles […]
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Maximizing Your Rewrite
I just finished a rewrite of Once Upon A Prince, releasing April 2013 from Zondervan. Covered nearly 87K words in two weeks. Not my favorite thing to do – tackle a rewrite in two weeks but that’s how it worked out. The opening needed a big change in my mind as well as my editor’s. Openings are my weakest. I tend to tell too much story. Not back story per say, just too much “pipe” as we say at My Book Therapy. I build too much story world. So I needed to tackle the opening and when I do that, I tend to ripe to shreds and start over. I probably rewrote the opening five times. Here’s the danger in doing that: forgetting other correlating threads in the story. I […]
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Get the Truth about Conferences!
I’m on the road helping my kids move into college today, so instead of a conversation with Sally, I have a special offer for you (and Sally!) I’ll never forget my first writers conference. Fresh from my first term as a missionary, I had decided overseas that I wanted to write a novel. While on home service, I worked slavishly to finish it, and when I discovered a Christian writers conference in my area, albeit small, I couldn’t wait to arrive, plunk down my novel before some editor, and return with a check in hand. Right. Sadly, I was woefully unprepared for the conference. I read nametags and titles, and a sweat broke out on my palms. I saw people with slick proposals and writing credits behind their names and […]
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Techniques for adding emotion: using other “Voices” in your scene
I love to watch people. Especially in an airport. Yes, I admit I compare myself to others (it’s a woman thing, I think), and I discovered that it’s a great way to reveal the emotional landscape of a character. See, we often project how we feel in how we might describe a character. Consider this description from the POV of our test subject, Darla, a woman who is afraid to fly. She sees this woman in the gate area: Across from her, a woman’s sandaled foot tapped to unheard music, her eyes closed, her hand draped over her carryon bag. In her other hand, an empty coffee cup from Starbucks – had she passed a Starbucks on the way in? — as if she’d started her morning early. Sure, fatigue […]
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