INK Sisters Write

Dear Kim, Another great session with agent-extraordinaire, Carrie Howland is in the books! (Literally.) Did you love the radial plotting exercise as much as I did? Mapping out Killer: A Love Story from the explosive climax outward gave me so much to think about. Adding to all of the AH-HAHs from my trusty plot map, I had an equally jaw dropping moment recently when Meg dug around my story and uncovered a major hole. That's me. And Ernesto. And Meg. We spent some time digging in the sand, but way more muscle was given to digging around our stories. Meg was on residency at the Foundation. ( I talk about the honor here .) Our group met daily to share pages we'd worked on during the retreat. Meg took home (well, to her cabin) several pages a night to review for us. One night she discovered the biggest hole in my manuscript. Like GRAND CANYON hole. Like, HOW-IN-THE-WORLD-COULD-I-MISS-THIS-HOLE, hole. Since the retreat I've been working on filling in an...

Dear Kim, Thank you for the William Joyce recap. I really enjoyed his talk and more so was impressed with the way he kicked off the #NY16SCBWI conference. There was a certain amount of: MAKE IT WORK air to this year's conference. Don't you agree? It seemed to pulse with themes like HARD WORK, WRITE...NOW, and DO THE WORK. All themes that I can get behind. I was also pleasantly surprised with the level of guidance in each breakout session this year, at least the sessions that I was able to attend. It is difficult to fit lecture, writing exercises, and leave time for questions when only given one hour per breakout session. Alvina Ling's session on plot gave me a bucket full of strategies (and tangible models from Alvina's rockstar editorial perspective), all crammed into a single hour. Alvina began her session with a show of hands. How many start with character? Setting? A single scene? And how may start with plot? In the room of one hundred or so folks the fewest ...