Kauai Writers Conference - Day 1

As I noted in a previous post, I am attending the Kauai Writers Conference in Lihue, Hawaii. It has been a great experience, and I have been working to take notes on what I learn there. Below are my notes from the first day. These are practical, meaningful insights, and I am excited to be here among great minds and successful writers.

This isn't my typical approach to blogging, but I wanted to capture and share what I am learning. Hope you enjoy!

Panel - Sources of inspiration

Greg Iles, Meg Wolitzer, Christina Baker Kline.

Some sources of Inspiration:

• What are you thinking about already anyway? This is what you should write about. What are you marinating in? What are you obsessing about? Find stories that are within the things that already burn within you. What are you preoccupied about? What are you thinking about anyway? Write about that!
• Reading.  Read about what you care about.
• There is a "tingle" you get when an idea feels right. 
• There is no simple or complete answer to where you receive your inspiration.
• Writers live the way others live but they retain their experience differently.
• Writers write about themselves. Whether you realize it or not, you can only write your own experience. Or it is at least embedded in what you do.
• One panelist said (paraphrasing here) "I realized I had to be more ambitious. Take something on that scares you. Take on writing that will have the impact that you want to have. Take on writing that is most important to you."
• "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." - Picasso

A few other notes:

• "I think revising is the greatest weapon in your arsenal." 
• If you are going to do this, it is going to be hours and hours and hours.
• "You will pay a price. The people who love you are going to pay a price. You are a miniature pain dispenser. It is not easy to be married to a writer." - Greg Iles
• You can do it. You can figure out how to be a writer and have a family. You just have to figure out how to make 
• "Can writing be taught? Or is it innate?" One panelist indicated that you can't make someone a writer, but you can make someone a better writer. Perhaps the point is to maximize the capabilities of the individual. Not everyone can play at the NFL level.
• Teaching writing is essentially nurturing talent. Writers need support, feedback, mentoring. 
• When you want to write for a living, think there are 1.1 Million doctors, but there only thousands of writers. There are a thousand reasons for the no, but only 1 yes. But, the system is always looking for someone who can be the next big hit. Swing for the fence.

Visual Storyboarding

The lady in front of me showed me her storyboard approach for her stories. She just finds pictures on Pinterest that inspire her story or match it and then she turns them into a storyboard. She doesn't make them linear - just puts everything together on one page. I tend to think in a linear fashion, but it probably doesn't need to be linear - just keep it as a way to capture visuals for idea generation.

What makes good writing good

Joshua Mohr and Nicholas Delbanco

• Nicholas started out by reading a scene from his house in France. So beautiful - brings clear images to my mind. Simple language but I could see the story.
• "The chief enemy of creativity is good taste." -Picasso
• It is powerful to read the story out loud. Josh reads his out loud up to 20 times to clean things up and make them pop and engaging and enthralling. "If I am getting bored on this page, I need to cut the whole page."
• You have to be in love with the language.
• Listen to what your inner ear tells you.
• Honor your own life experiences. Tell your story, you are unique, you are special, tell YOUR story. 
• "Your book doesn't care about your outline."
• "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" (Quoting someone)
• There are some formulaic writers, but that is a version of painting by numbers rather than painting. 
• When you introduce a character, you need to make the reader not want to leave the person. Make them compelling and beautiful.
• It is possible to overdo it on your writing, but this is rarely the case. You should be willing to pour everything into the writing, craft it to PERFECTION. It is rarely overdone.
• Write endlessly until it seems like it is "a moment's thought." Help the writing be so easily digested and learned and internalized by the reader.
• Be careful - it is possible to continue to polish without making your writing better.

Plot

Greg Iles
Plot is the most elemental thing that there is. You can write and succeed with the basics of plot. But if you want to write something that moves people, it must be bound up with character. At the end of the book, they must feel surprised along with a sense of "of course that happened!"

Tools for assessing and enhancing plot
12 Stages -  Look at the 12 stages of the hero's journey. (Read A Writer's Journey, or at least the 30 page version tat is shorter. The Writer's Memo is the sort version. Universal storytelling patterns. The ordinary world - spend plenty of time on the ordinary world so that everyone knows what it is and make it meaningful.

1. The call to adventure - Obi Wan inviting Luke to come with him to the rebellion to learn the force
2. The reluctant hero (refusal of the call) - shows fear and has internal drama. Luke feels obligated to keep farming.
3. The wise old man or woman mentor - Obi Wan.
4. Into the special world - They go into space.
5. Tests, allies and enemies - The fellowship of the ring. 
6. The inmost cave - Death Star.
7. The supreme ordeal - Blowing up the death star.
8. Seizing the sword - Using the force to blow up the death star.
9. The road back - Willow returning to his village.
10. The resurrection - ? Not sure...
11. Returning with the elixir - Willow returning and knowing magic.
12. (I must have missed something, here... there should be 12 :))

You don't have to use these principles in this order only - you can mix them up 1,000 different ways. You need to eventually internalize these into who you are and how you write so that they are always integrated and ever-present.

Archetypes - all of these character archetypes can be used in your writing as an impetus for change in your story. You decide - you control the fates. You have control! Be grateful that you are the sole authority of your work!

1. The Hero - the essence of heroism - not bravery, courage, being a bad-ass, being super-smart. It is sacrifice. That is the element of the hero - going out there and carrying 5 people and saving lives and putting in the work. Momma is the ultimate hero. 
1. The hero must have an inner and an outer problem that they are facing. This is critical - they need to overcome or make peace with both for the story to work. 
2. The Antihero (protagonist) - just as important as the hero. Is this the buddy? The sidekick?
3. The Mentor - Merlin is the classic mentor. Dumbledore, Obi Wan Kanobi, etc. (Note that there is a terrible shortage of women mentors in literature). 
4. Shape-Shifter (the character of ambiguous loyalty). This character type can be used to provide jolts and emotional problems. This person is always changing from the hero's point of view - it is hard to know where their loyalties lie.  Boramire in Lord of the Rings.
5. The Shadow - Jung: "evil isn't separate from human nature. The task of the human is to recognize the shadow and make friends with and integrate into your own personality. Then you are a whole person. Embodies the full antagonistic principle." So, how can a person integrate their "dark" side in some form of resolution? 
6. Threshold Guardian - the drill sergeant, etc. It is a person who is making it difficult for you to go forward with your plan. Someone who might stymie you but that you can overcome.
7. The Trickster - Bugs Bunny, Briar Rabbit, etc. Stirs things up for the sake of stirring things up. 
8. The Herald - This is the character that tends to announce the call to adventure - I think it is the wizard dwarf in Willow (Billy Barty). 

The Negation of the Negation (from Robert McKey, a well-known sort of Hollywood guru).
Most dramatic works do not fulfill their full potential because they do not negate the negation.

Here is how it works. Most stories have a contradictory value, or opposite value to the primary value. (e.g. selfishness, hate, despair, depression). These values contradict the primary value - justice, love, etc. Begin by identifying the primary value at stake. (this is the negation - e.g. justice, love, sacrifice, hope). The negation of the negation is that the desired negation doesn't really happen. Or, if it does happen it is a warped version of the negation. It seems like The Twilight Zone is probably does this regularly - you think it will resolve, but it ends up being a warped version of a resolution.

Final tips from Greg Iles

1. Search and destroy all passive voice.
2. Remove all unnecessary words.
3. Your words need to go over the person's mind like water going over a rock.
4. (Referring to Stephen King's Concept) The writer's mind is like a house, and the subconscious ins like your basement. Don't go down into the basement and start to organize those boxes. There is already a crew down there working on the boxes. Stay out of the way and then begin working on the book.

Writing for Young Adults

Meg Wolitzer and Katie Davis

I arrived late to this session, but here is what I heard:

• Fiction for young people should feel very immediate and emotionally powerful. When writing for young people, there must be a sense for having it happen. Try to create a need that you are trying to satisfy.
• Take fewer side-notes in the books you write for younger adults. The emotions are still the same and strong, but don't take as many tangents. 
• Every word should be in service of the story. 
• Say, "it's going to be okay, because I can always change it."
• Write about the thing that you are scared to write about. What is it that you don't want people to know about you? This is the thing that you should write about. It is something that is deep inside you and needs to come out.
• "There's room for any good book... Write what moves you and compels you."

If you are writing for children, it might make sense to enjoy the author's podcast "Writing for Children Podcast."