Last weekend I attended a 2 day writing and romance extravaganza at the Chicago North RWA Spring Fling (quite a mouthful). This is my 3rd time at the conference (held every other year.) In the past I’ve found it to be the perfect place for networking, marketing, and learning about the business side of writing. But what about the actual craft of writing? Jill is constantly telling us to focus on improving the work and worry about the business side of writing later. Could a conference such as the Spring Fling actually help to improve my writing skills? It was time to find out.
This year I was determined to weed my way through Pitch Master classes and Agent and Editor Seminars to pick up some great writing tips. It wasn’t easy. There is a certain SELL! PITCH! MARKET! vibe at a conference that is hard to fight. Everyone is hoping to be the next big breakout author or bump into Susan Elizabeth Phillips at the Chocolate Reception. (Romance conferences are filled with chocolate). The chatter over drinks at the bar is almost always about business, selling, and marketing. This is especially a hot topic now that the ebook world is shaking things up. Still, I managed to find some writing gems hidden away. Here are my top contenders:
- A way to meet fellow writers. Networking doesn’t always have to be about business. I met several wonderful writers who are looking for critiques partners, research buddies, and beta readers. Finding authors who will read and critique your work is an invaluable way to improve your writing.
- Find out what is happening behind the scenes. This may be exclusive to the Chicago-North chapter, but Friday evening I found myself at a Hot Night Critique. Authors brought in 5 pages of their steamiest sex scenes to read aloud and receive feedback. Even if you don’t include love scenes in your work it can be amazing insider information on what makes an emotional scene work. Plus it was great fun!
- Sign up for the craft workshops. You won’t find workshops like “What’s Love Got to Do With It? Erotica for Beginners” at AWP but most conferences offer great seminars on the craft of writing. Take as many craft seminars as you can and try to mix them in with the business ones. Remember, all the business, marketing, and networking means little without great writing.
There are ways to stay faithful to your writing project. You can tell people, “Have I told you about this new thing I’m working on? It’s probably the best idea I’ve ever had. I’m so excited to devote all my free time to it!” But first you have to work on making those statements sound believable because trust me, no one is buying it.
I’ve tried to convince myself of these things in the past. I’ve told myself and others that I was truly happy to be a one-project kind of girl. The truth is, in the past few weeks I’ve cheated on my novel…with a short story.
That’s right, I created new characters, put them in a never before written setting, and let them do their thing. It got me excited about writing again and left me with two new characters who maybe will find their way into my novel. I believe there can be crossover and that everyone can share the page peacefully. Is this unrealistic? That remains to be seen. But I do know that my story is on the verge of a roadtrip and on that trip my novel characters will meet my short story characters. When this happens, I will, awkwardly, because remember this is my first time trying something like this, mediate the two groups of character.
Now, I do not recommend you cheat often. Pulling a Tiger Woods will accomplish nothing and leave you with a mess of one-dimensional characters readers will wish to see killed off within the first few pages, in my opinion. At a certain point you need to choose which project you can live with and stick with it. But if you’re feeling young and creatively stifled, I say go for it once or twice. Write some poems, draft a sketch. Just always keep your eye on the prize and remember the piece you first fell for, the one worth working at.
Ali Kelley is a writer living in Chicago. You can follow her mis-adventures in novel writing here. She also blogs about nonprofits for the Zealous Good blog. Ali enjoys the finer things in life like pajamas that double as jeans.
StoryStudio’s Advanced Fiction Workshop has been around for a long time. I was part of it five years ago, when it was made up of a group of about ten writers who met every other Wednesday in our comfy back room. At each session, we would discuss pieces of writing from two of our fellow group members, and collect two other pieces to read and discuss the next time we met. At the time, I knew it was incredibly fun to be connected to a steady stream of new stories and chapters from a group of talented writers, but I never would have guessed how I’d get to see those same stories and chapters evolve into something much bigger than a workshop submission.
The first time I ever read pages from M. Molly Backes’s The Princesses of Iowa, for instance, it was twenty double spaced pages stapled together, with the working title Paige, Turning, in the upper right corner. Molly was a new transplant to Chicago, still reworking her plot outline and starting the hunt for an agent. Five years later, Molly is the assistant director of StoryStudio Chicago, and Paige, Turning has grown up to be The Princesses of Iowa - which, after much anticipation, was released today by Candlewick Press. Before we all start demanding she sign our copies, we asked Molly a few questions about her journey from draft, to workshop, to publication.
Tell us about The Princesses of Iowa.
It’s a young adult novel set in suburban Iowa, about a senior in high school who’s spent her entire life trying to be “perfect” – at least according to the rules her mother and best friends set for her. After a drunk driving accident forces her to spend a summer apart from everyone, she comes home to realize that everyone else’s version of perfect isn’t really working for her, and that she needs to start learning how to listen to her own voice and becoming her own person. My agent describes it as a “reverse-Cinderella” story, and one of my former StoryStudio students (who happens to be a book blogger) described it as a “love letter to writing.” I like both.
How did the Advanced Fiction Workshop fit into things?
I enrolled in the Advanced Fiction Workshop right after I moved to Chicago in 2007, and stayed in the workshop for about three years, in which time I was working on various drafts of what is now The Princesses of Iowa. I got some great feedback and found it to be incredibly helpful as I went through revision after revision – first with my agent, and then with my editor.
You say you wouldn’t be the writer you are today without Jill Pollack. Why is that?
Jill always encourages writers to push themselves, to go deeper and take scenes farther than you first think you want to take them, and she’s very supportive of writing that’s experimental and unconventional. She helped me to think about fiction from a more structural and analytical standpoint, as well, which has helped me both as a writer and a reader. You know how when electrons absorb enough energy, they make a jump from one level of the atom to another? (That’s a thing, right? I was always a terrible physics student, and only liked it for its metaphorical possibilities.) I felt that my years in the Advanced Fiction Workshop helped me jump to the next level in my writing. I guess I didn’t need to bring in physics to say that.
Anyone who attended a Write-a-thon between 2009 and 2011 probably remembers seeing you hunched over your laptop – or line edits – or galley proofs – working on the book. Are there any specific moments of the writing/editing process that stick out in your mind as being particularly StoryStudio-ish?
There are quite a few, actually! But I’ll mention two:
- April 2009: An editor from one of the big six was interested in my book, but asked that I make some changes to the ending and send it back to her. I agreed with a lot of her suggestions, so I set out to make some of the changes, but of course you can’t just change the ending without also changing the middle and beginning.
At this point, I’d written maybe four different first chapters for the book, and I wasn’t happy with any of them. And on this particular day, I was feeling downright grumpy about all of it – the difficulty of revision, the stupidness of writing, etc, and I didn’t want to write anything. We were having an all-staff write-in or something – remember, we used to do those writing lunches? Anyway, so I was sitting on the black futon with my laptop, whining about how grumpy I was, how I didn’t want to write, how everything sucked, and Jill said, “Write a rant,” which was probably a nice way of saying shut up, but I took the advice and wrote what became the prologue. It was one of those amazing writing times, where you kind of know that you have something when you finish – I remember I went over to my friend Nick’s house that evening and read it to him, and we were both just like… yeah. That’s it.
- January 2010: My now re-written manuscript had just been rejected by the acquisitions committee, even though the editor I’d been working with wanted it. Jill told me I had 24 hours to mourn, and then I had to get on with my life. I remember standing in the hallway outside StoryStudio, maybe a half hour before my workshop was supposed to begin, and talking to my agent on the phone. She suggested it might be time to put the manuscript aside for a while. I almost agreed, but then I rallied and gave my big Oscar-moment speech about how I’d just re-written this huge chunk, including a new beginning, and how we should give it a great new title and send it out one last time! And my agent got motivated too, and we were both reassuring ourselves that we’d go out and fight one more time, and all the while I was strolling back and forth in the dark hallways outside StoryStudio. We gave it a new title, my agent wrote a new pitch letter, and we sold it to Candlewick a week later.
You teach quite a few classes at StoryStudio, including the Young Adult and Children’s Writing Workshop. How has teaching influenced your writing?
The value of a writing workshop isn’t just in getting feedback on your own work, but in allowing you to see what and how other writers craft stories – what they do well, where they get stuck, etc. The same is true for teaching, often to an even greater extent. Reading manuscripts at all levels of development has helped me to think about my process specifically and the writing process in general. And again, teaching has helped me to develop that critical eye and bring that kind of analytical attention to my own drafts – but I think it’s helped me to be more patient and generous with myself, too, because I can remind myself that I’d never be as critical of my students’ early drafts as I am of my own, that we all write shitty first drafts, and even though I often ignore my own advice (for instance, I always tell my students not to go back and revise early chapters until they’ve finished a full draft, and yet I’m currently doing exactly that), at least I know what I probably should be doing.
M. Molly Backes’s The Princesses of Iowa is available today from Candlewick Press.
This summer, StoryStudio is once again offering our Young Writers Creative Writing Camp at our North Shore location. This unique north shore summer camp features lots of writing, as well as a chance to perform your words. Over the next few weeks, our youth writing camp instructors will be introducing themselves here on Cooler. First, meet Cecilia Pinto! Cecilia has been teaching at StoryStudio for the past five years, working with both adults and youth. Here’s Cecilia’s take on teaching young writers:
Last night I dreamed that I was visiting a school. It looked somewhat like the grammar school that I attended but also like other schools that I’ve visited. I’ve been teaching creative writing to kids for more than twelve years and have probably visited over a hundred classrooms. So, if the classroom in my dream felt both familiar and strange in the way things often do in dreams, it’s also an experience that I’ve had in my waking life. I’ve been here before, I think and I look at the new faces that in turn look back at me.
In my dream I was visiting the classroom to observe a woman who was teaching creative writing. The classroom was crowded with young people of varying ages and adults. The woman’s lesson was an ambitious one; she asked everyone in the class to read an entire book during the course of the forty minute period and then write a poem.
Some of the adults were making an attempt to do as she’d requested but most of the kids were just milling around. The woman asked me if I thought she should tailor the lesson differently. Wanting to be diplomatic, I said that perhaps just an excerpt of the book would be useful. She held some notecards on which random words were written. I suggested also that perhaps she might distribute these cards to kids who could then use them to make a poem.
I don’t think either of these suggestions was implemented. Time passed in the dream and as the class ended the students were encouraged by the teacher to share what they had written. A young boy stood and read the most amazing poem and I thought, you see, anything is possible.
I’m encouraged personally by this dream both as a teacher and a writer. But the most interesting thing in the previous paragraph for me is the phrase: time passed in the dream. Something happened that I could not define, couldn’t even see, something happened, time passed and a beautiful poem arrived.
There is, in all writing, mystery. We can point at the pieces that make a piece of writing whole and these important aspects of craft must be given their due. But what’s equally important is putting in the time because when we do, something happens that we cannot see. And this marvelous something is the person employing the craft to create themselves which is why wonderful writing can be created by second grade students, ten year olds, teenagers and adults.
I offer this to those who might be thinking of taking a first writing class, or perhaps because it’s something that you used to do but don’t anymore or because you know or are a young person who thinks that writing would be, well, cool. Which it is.
It’s clear to me through my work with writing students of all ages that each of us has not only the desire but enough mystery within us to create work of beautiful self-expression, no matter our age and no matter what the world may think or expect of us. Anything is possible.
There are still seats available in both sessions of the Young Writers Creative Writing Camp, StoryStudio’s own north shore summer camp. Click here to learn more!
Last weekend my friend SG came in town for a visit. We had a short 24 hours together and a lot of ground to cover. “Let’s plan cocktails so we can talk about how we’re not writing,” she said.
I laughed with her but then felt bad about how much “not writing” I’ve been doing.
But a week later, my mind is in a different place. As I look around the Studio I see so much to celebrate—new classes, new teachers, great student writing successes--that I’m not finding the energy to feel bad about what’s still on the “to do” list. 
This week alone we’re planning the book release party for Molly’s novel and putting final touches on the StoryStudio-hosted Printers Row Lit Fest panels, and buying wine for the Chicago Literary Alliance get-together. All projects that have been in the works for a while so they don’t readily spring to mind as home runs. But they absolutely are and they deserve more than a passing glance.
This positivity is not my natural state. (I know that may come as a surprise for some of you.) I’m right there with all the other writers lamenting the passing of time without a finished manuscript. But I’m still so surprised when my incredibly talented friends and students feel bad about their work no matter how much I gush over it.
Over our sojutinis, I told SG I still remember a story she wrote almost a decade ago, back when we were in a workshop together. All these years later the main character still resonates with me. I told her it was an affecting story and she should be sending it out.
She took another sip of her Lychee-tini and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
I peppered her with questions about why she was holding the story back, assuming it was because she didn’t think the story was good enough. It’s only now occurred to me that sending out the piece may not have been the point at all. The point was to have written it in the first place. And that’s cause for celebration.
At the Studio, we hear about a lot of writing successes, and just as many writing failures. Only, what if the failures are really just getting us closer to a win?
It’s all in the interpretation of course. 
A writer from our Advance Fiction Workshop was disappointed this week when he learned he was a finalist in a major story competition instead of the winner. I was stunned. I thought being a finalist was pretty exciting.
I’m not suggesting that we should compromise our goals or that “good enough” is always good enough.
What I am suggesting is that we take our energies and point them toward the positive. Let’s redefine “success” to be of some use in this hypermedia world.
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” –Herm Albright
Three Steps to Celebrating Writing Success and Losing the Bad Attitude
Step One: Recognize a creative win
Writing success comes in all shapes and sizes and colors. I’m always telling my business writing students that the writing they do at work is an opportunity to be creative. From now on, send your boss progress reports written in Iambic Pentameter.
Step Two: Use positive reinforcement rather than self-flagellation
Let’s face it: complaining about not getting to they gym doesn’t actually translate into more minutes on the treadmill. So why not be good to your psyche and instead of worrying about not writing enough, celebrate the ten minutes of fragments you sneak into a notebook just before you get out of bed.
Step Three: Remember, all writing counts
Instead of lamenting that I haven’t worked on my own novel in months, I’m deciding here and now to celebrate writing my essays. The next time you’re composing a masterpiece to post on Facebook, practice your storytelling skills before you hit “share.”
My name is Jill and today I wrote a blog post.
Who wants to celebrate next?
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Jill Pollack is the founder and director of StoryStudio Chicago: the center for writing and writers. She is a co-host of Content Jam 2012 conference this June with Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media, Tim Frick of MightyBytes, and Hilary Marsh.
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