Writing Excuses Podcast

Where do you go as an adult to get more education about writing?

• Writing and writing and writing (practice) is a good technique, but the best writers are those who practice the right techniques and perfect them.
• Be able to recognize your mistakes and improve it-writing workshops can help you with that!
• At any point in your career, you can still gain benefits from going to a teacher, writing workshop, or writing group.
• At these writing shops sometimes they articulate something you already know, but they take it from the known part of your brain to the verbal part of your brain so that you can then pass it on to someone else.

·      Valuable work shops:

•  Clarion and Clarion west—6 weeks long and each week you have a different guest instructor.
•  Literary Boot Camp
• Bible Paradise
• Norwestcon: professionals critique your story
• Writing Superstars: a lot of business related stuff
• Odyssey
• Towst Tool Box: deals with novel and short stories
• Launchpad: NASA funded
• Writing Excuses
• I Should Be Writing

·      Online resources:

•  SFWA.org-information center that has nuts and bolts of writing
• Turkey City Lexicon: the said-book-ism, where everything is ‘she said brightly’: a list of phrases that are talking about common mistakes. An enummarted list of writing pitfalls.
• Magicalwords: a group blog
• Book view cafe:

·      A word about workshops:

•   It takes a while to internalize the tools that you learn at workshops. If you go to one of these workshops, recognize that things will be hard because you have new tools.
• You will learn dozens of things, take 3 post-it notes and write three lessons that you have learned and focus on those things. Once you have mastered those things, you can pull it off and put on another one.
•  Start with what is most difficult for you and that is where you will make the most progress.