The week before last, Sarah and Neidy got to do something magical: after years of writing, editing, and workshopping together virtually, they met in real life! They gathered with a slew of other writers in Kansas City for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’s annual conference. There they attended sessions, purchased books, snapped at poetry readings, and met new friends. During the three-day conference, Sarah and Neidy attended a combined thirty-three panels presented by more than 100 writers, including: authors
, , , , Lindsay Wong, , and , and agents Annie Hwang, Sarah Bowlin, Mina Hamedi, and Lucy Carson. While the event went by in a flash, they did manage to jot down some key takeaways. Below is a list of their favorites.On Picking a Project
Remember that your goal in crafting a story is to allow the reader to experience a life they would never lead through a character they will never forget.
You can craft a story from interesting bits of information you’ve collected.
Don’t waste your time imagining a bad-faith reader. Or, in other words, focus on your intentions, not how a reader might misconstrue them.
On First Drafts
Write it wrong. Edit it right.
Let your story dictate its own shape and length.
On Line Work
Your language can gesture. That is, you can say one thing and emote something else with the right words.
When expressing a moment of vulnerability in your writing, ask yourself, how can you make the reader experience that vulnerability?
On Characterization
Ignore likability. Instead ask, does your character like the world? Does the world of your story like the character?
Consider your responsibility to your characters. How would they want to be portrayed? How should they be portrayed?
Trace all moments of action to the psyche that feeds them.
On Revision
Listen to a recording of yourself reading your manuscript. The parts where your voice slows down are the parts where your story is not working.
Eliminate stiff, formal language; bald facts without interpretation; clichés, generalizations, and vagueness; and distance between you and your characters.
When a draft feels too lofty, pull back and search for whose story it is. Who is the protagonist? Why? Who is the narrator? Why?
On Knowing You’re Done
A reader should be able to trust that the writer has relentlessly self-interrogated their own writing intentions.
It’s time to stop revising when you figure out why you were writing in the first place.
On The Business of Writing
A ‘successful writing career’ is subjective, and you should define your own success.
Query your dream agents first, and never query two agents at the same firm.
Both Neidy and Sarah agree that this conference was worth the time away from their regular life, not least of all because they experienced it together. If you attended AWP, feel free to include some of your own takeaways in the comments!
Our biggest takeaway kernel: Go meet your writing friends!
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Sarah has been taking a deep-dive into creative non-fiction this semester through one of her graduate school workshops, and she has been reading several remarkable essays including: “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell, “Camel Ride, Los Angeles, 1986,” by Porochista Khakpour, “Uncle Tony’s Goat,” by Leslie Marmon Silko, “Cutty, One Rock,” by August Kleinzahler, “Freaky Beasts,” by William Giraldi, and “A Brief History of Near and Actual Losses,” by Camille Dungy. Two essays, though, had the biggest effect on her writing. “Neck” (scroll down) by Maggie O’Farrell showed how to create tension, withhold information, and raise stakes. And the title essay from Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America was a revelation for showing how an author doesn’t need to fully understand a situation or his own motivations in order to write about it. To be able to write her own 6,000-word memoir Sarah had to pause her fiction writing for a couple of weeks. The writing required some deep emotional excavation, careful reflection, and intense focus, but she’s really glad that she finally did it.
Shelby’s been working her way through GennaRose Nethercott’s short story collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart. She’s enjoying the fantastical and inventive stories, but she can’t stop thinking about one in particular: “A Diviner’s Abecedarian.” The story is about a group of middle school girls who don’t like the new girl and make it their mission to turn her into what they want her to be. It experiments with form, each section a divination that goes from A to Z, and is told in the first person collective (Shelby loves when writers can pull that off!).
This week Natalia followed a curiosity into academic writing on Proust. Her desire to learn how consciousness is written has been really exciting as she explores phenomenological roots in how point of view and interiority are constructed and revealed in works of literature. Her thinking on this is being shaped by these resources: Proust’s in Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives, ”Narrative Tones and Perspectives in Proust's Novel” by Brian G. Rogers, and Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to the Remembrance of Things Past by Patrick Alexander.
After back-to-back writing events (AWP, Tin House’s winter workshop, and another session of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing’s Deep Dive Workshop), Neidy needed some time to recharge. She spent some evenings watching Love Is Blind and almost finished reading Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. While she hates to endorse a book before she’s done, Neidy believes this will be one of her favorite 2024 reads.