The Joy of a Good Writers Conference

Posted on by Erin Bartels

This weekend I spent a couple days in the company of other writers at the Breathe Christian Writers Conference. It was my third year attending, my second year leading a workshop, this time on taking our writing to the next level through rewriting and revision. We had a fantastic keynote speaker, Julie Cantrell, and I’m looking forward to reading her book, Into the Free. And we enjoyed inspiring words and a charge to write the truth and write at the highest level of excellence we can from Dr. Michael Wittmer, a professor at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and a friend.

Besides those entertaining and encouraging presentations, I was able to attend workshops led by several talented writers, professors, and professionals, including

-Dave Beach, a psychologist who turns his expertise toward creating characters that are highly developed and nuanced by examining them through various psychological lenses. Check out his website, characterdoctor.com to try it out!

–Zachary Bartels and Ted Kluck, who took us through all the pluses and pitfalls of indie and traditional publishing, highlighting their own successes and failures in both arenas, and teaching us how to read between the lines while working with editors and big publishing houses. Check out their indie micropress, Gut Check Press.

–Dr. Michael Stevens and Dr. Matt Bonzo, who gave us insight into the life’s work of Wendell Berry, who spent fifty years writing about one small locality and made the people and the events in this little rural Kentucky town speak to readers on a universal level. I’m very interested to read their book after dipping into Wendell Berry ‘s work.

I was also privileged to spend time in the company of writers like Tracy Groot, Suzanne Burden, Alison Hodgson, Andy Rogers, Josh Mosey, and others. Breathe is an intimate, noncompetitive group–far more intimate than the huge ACFW Conference we went to in St. Louis this year–and I appreciate the camaraderie there.

The whole affair has me even more excited for the second annual Write on the Red Cedar Conference that my own writing group, Capital City Writers Association, is holding January 16-17 in East Lansing, Michigan. We’re ecstatic to welcome literary agent and author Donald Maass as our keynote, along with other writers, journalists, editors, and agents from around the country. If you’re a writer in the Midwest, this is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business for a very reasonable price.

You’ll be hearing more about that conference in the months to come. In the meantime, our very busy season at home is hopefully slowing down a little bit. Around here there are gardens to ready for the winter, desks to clean off and organize, quilts and crochet throws to make, rooms to clean…and a new novel brewing in my mind.

October is half over. I want to really live intentionally during the second half. How about you?

The Intentional Writer: Finding the Time, Space, and Inspiration You Need To Write

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I’ve mentioned it a few times on the blog and now here it is. Inspired by the presentation I gave at the Breathe Christian Writers Conference last October and bringing together some of my best blogging and writing about writing, I offer you The Intentional Writer.

Intentional Writer ebook CVR FINAL

It’s available on Kindle now and I will soon be working on formatting the print edition. Here’s the description of what you’ll get inside:

You can make creative writing a regular part of your life—without making it a rigid daily requirement.

If you are trying to make creative writing a more intentional—and yet not tyrannical—part of your life, The Intentional Writer will help you to pursue your goals, hone your craft, and get your work out there into the hands of readers. This entertaining and informative book will help you analyze your motivations for writing, put yourself in the path of inspiration to keep your ideas flowing, deal with both internal and external distractions, reshape your surroundings and your schedule to aid your process, and take your work from first draft to final publishable product.

From encouragement and insight to the nuts and bolts of storytelling and editing, you’ll find something in the following pages that will change your writing rhythm for the better.

Taking My Own Writing Advice (or, My Terrible Epiphany)

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I hope you won’t mind if I direct most of this post at myself. Because, frankly, I need a good talking to/kick in the pants/smack upside the head.

Myself in a Mirror

Listen, Erin, you have some problems. It seems like everyone compliments your writing (all those agents who declined to take you on had very nice things to say about your technical skill) but there are some serious problems with your manuscript for A Beautiful Fiction that, even if you self-publish, you’re going to want to fix. You know what these are.

Problem 1: Beta readers find it difficult to sympathize with your protagonist.

Your rationale: My narrative voice is detached in an attempt to counter the tendency in a lot of modern fiction to tell too much and therefore not allow the reader to think at all.

Solution: Uh, DUH! Switch from 3rd person to 1st person so you can let people inside your protagonist’s messed up head! (Yes, this will mean rewriting the entire 85,700-word manuscript.)

But that’s not all is it? How about…

Problem 2: Story takes too long to get going.

Your rationale: It just wouldn’t make sense to start later or move things along faster because the storyline would be completely implausible.

Solution: Start at the point the action is intense, then flash back a bit here and there to fill in the details. Seriously, it took you this long to figure this out? For crying out loud, you just wrote a blog post about this very technique for a different story!

(Yes, I admit, it was when I was rereading my own blog post [hanging my head in shame] that I realized this advice could be applied more broadly in my own work.)

There are probably other problems in that manuscript, but two is enough to work on for now. So get your butt in gear, Erin, because you have got a LOT to do now.

Sheesh.

In my defense, though, I will say that had I not stepped away from that manuscript for about six months, I would not have come to realize these possible solutions to my problems. Now that I can look at it more objectively, I can get back to work and make A Beautiful Fiction beautiful indeed.