3 Inadvertent Writing Lessons: SCBWI Winter Conference 2010

1. Read your work aloud.
What happened: SCBWI Executive Director Lin Oliver (who is awesome, by the way) tripped repeatedly over the full name of the organization (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) before saying, "Someday we'll rename this something I can pronounce." (I agree and call SCBWI "Scooby.")

How it applies: Awkward things like frumpy language, unintentional alliteration, and goofy punctuation are often best discovered by reading them aloud. Parents may read your book to their kids. Listeners may discover your book through audio. You may get to read an excerpt for the public. Uncover the bumps while you can still fix them!

2. Don't stick to your outline just because you have one.
What happened: The first conference session I attended was lackluster. The speaker was unorganized and unprepared to fill an hour. At other conferences, attendees can move among sessions -- if one turns out lame, you quietly slip out and into another. For SCBWI Winter '10, we had to choose our sessions ahead of time, and got a ticket to get into each one. Regardless, I should've left that first session and asked my way politely into a different one.

How it applies: Say you're an outliner, a plotter. You like to know how your story begins, what its turning points are, and how it ends. You map a book down to its scenes. By the time you've done so, you feel you already know your story -- you just have to write it down. But story discovery doesn't end in the planning. One of your characters is going to say, "I wouldn't do that," or "You want me to say what, now?" and you'll need to be flexible. Flexible enough to chalk up your first outline as development experience and move ahead with one that fits your characters best.

3. Take chances.
What happened: I'm confident about a lot of stuff. I can push my body to do tough things, I'm very good with maps, and I can smack down at trivia (bring it on). But put me in a room full of people and tell me to make friends? I AM A TOTAL CHICKEN. (bawk.) One of the greatest reasons to go to a writers' conference is to meet other writers and writing professionals. Doing so can keep us from becoming crazy cat ladies. But I mostly failed on this point at SCBWI. I met a few folks (hi, folks!) but I didn't take full advantage of being in the company of 1,000 other book lovers. What did I have to lose? Nothing.

How it applies: If we don't take chances, our work isn't art. It just isn't. Art is in the unexpected choice, the elegant solution to a difficult problem, the reinterpretation of a known that transforms it into something altogether new. Yeah, your bold word choice may sound ridiculous the next day. Your main character, an epidemiologist who happens to have studied exactly the right regional dialect of 14th-Century Norman, may seem constructed when he slips back in time to plague-era France. And someone may read your book and say, "This is just Harry Potter, with wombats." But! There's always the chance you've done something artful, something lasting, something worth the time away from your family, your friends, your Buffy DVDs. That chance is there for the taking. TAKE IT. Nine times of ten you'll turn it into a steaming pile o' poo. But time #10 will transform that poo into a shiny nugget of awesome for the ages.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •