Ooligan Press to Attend Willamette Writers Conference

by Mary Breaden

Last year, Ooligan Press had the pleasure of attending the Willamette Writers Conference pitch room for a busy Friday. Ooligan Press, for those of you who don't know, is Portland State University's student-run press for students enrolled in the Master's in Publishing program. During the summer months of 2012, I was the co-manager of the press's acquisitions department and managed the press's slush pile.

With slush pile management comes certain tales of woe from both the stand-point of the writer and the acquisitions editor. Writer: Why can't my (unsolicited) manuscript get in the door with any publisher? Slush pile manager: Why does my press never receive any publishable works? Ooligan Press's front-list provides a refutation to this paradigm, for in recent years, all of our increasingly popular titles have come from the slush pile, even Oregon Book Award winning young adult novel, Blue Thread, by Ruth Tenzer Feldman.

The WWC gave our press a chance to get into a more active role; with agents and other publishers, we waited for the conference's dear authors to walk up and pitch their manuscript. The first pitch of the day was a woman named Karelia Stetz-Water, who I didn't meet because I was lost at nearby Portland Airport trying to get to the conference. But lovely Laura received Karelia's pitch and handed me her proposal for her literary fiction novel, As Though Our Beauty Were a War when I arrived. "Read it. I think you'll love her," she told me with a grin. I read in silence and responded, "I want this."

After the conference--where we met heaps of talented authors--I emailed Karelia and solicited a copy of As Though Our Beauty Were a War. She responded with a characteristic good-nature and professionalism that we would later know her for (writerly dramatics, this one has not, outside of her fiction, that is). I read the manuscript and did not want to stop. I fell into the charms of her main character Triinu, a young girl in the Willamette Valley who was trundling along her path to understanding her body and sexuality with great intelligence among less artistically sensitive classmates. The kindness of Triinu, her nostalgia and impatience for the future was something I could relate to. The author's lyrical grace was a technique that I admired/envied.

During the fall and winter months, Karelia very kindly worked with the acquisitions department to developmentally edit As Though Our Beauty Were a War, which would help the new department managers to pitch the novel to the rest of the press later on in the spring of this year. When managers McKenzie Workman, Drew Lazzara, and Whitney Smyth presented the novel to the general assembly of Ooligan Press, they told us, "Here is a heroine that any reader can love." The book was unanimously accepted. And now, almost a full year later from when we first found Karelia at WWC, the real fun begins!

Here at Ooligan Press, we are very grateful to have been present at the Willamette Writers Conference. Our presence at the conference meant that our program's young publishers would have a chance to work with a novel that truly resonated with them.

WRITING FROM LIFE, by Molly Best Tinsley

Memoir, like any narrative, requires a strong story line, well-rounded characters, and intense, richly detailed scenes that surround the reader with your remembered world. There are also challenges peculiar to the writing of memoir, and here are some tips for surmounting them.

Memoir is not autobiography. Unless you’re a celebrity, readers need more incentive to engage with your life than simply a blow-by-blow chronology that begins at birth. Memoir requires a sharp focus, a specific topic; it pulls a single thread from your life and sticks with it, letting go of any characters and incidents that don’t pertain. In crafting Entering the Blue Stone, I had to say no to countless threads of family dysfunction—what family doesn’t hide plenty?—in order to spotlight the process of helping my parents navigate the final chaotic decade of their lives.

The author of memoir is the implicit protagonist. Although your inclination may be to hide behind the easier role of witness, it’s important to identify your active role in events, your needs and wants, your strengths and most important, your flaws, in order to bring out your own arc—in other words, how you changed over the course of the story. As the protagonist in Blue Stone, I learned, for example, to accept my inability to fix everything. It wasn’t until I began writing the narrative, though, that I realized how much my own anxiety, rather than my parents’ comfort, had driven my decisions.

Scenes are the power source of memoir. I took copious notes during my parents’ last years—it was my defense against insanity. When it came time to write the experience, I could recreate scenes verbatim. If your memories are less precise, don’t worry. Readers of memoir don’t expect tape-recorded dialogue. With your thorough knowledge of the people in your past, you can trust yourself to recreate the sort of language they might have used and craft scenes of emotional truth, if not verbatim records.

To get past the fear that the real people in your life may object to their portraits in your memoir, examine your motives in writing. Flattery or revenge or even writing just to prove a point—these motives lead to flat characters and one-dimensional stories. If your goal is to recreate a portion of your past in all its fullness and complexity, you will do your characters justice. You won’t need to apologize to anyone.

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Molly Tinsley left the English faculty at the US Naval Academy to write full-time. Her story collection Throwing Knives won the Oregon Book Award; her most recent release is the memoir Entering the Blue Stone. Three years ago she donned the editor/publisher hat, co-founding the small press Fuze Publishing (www.fuzepublishing.com). She facilitates the workshops, Crafting Lively Dialogue and The Second Draft.

Dale Basye on Heck, Where the Bad Kids Go

Willamette Writers Registration Open

Willamette Writers It's that time of year again, and the buzz is starting about the Willamette Writers Conference. This year's theme is "Fresh Brewed," and it's all about percolating new ideas, fermenting those that we’ve already got to make them even better, and brewing up a unique writing experience. Portland, home to coffee roasters and breweries, is the perfect source of inspiration.

Included this year is a workshop that builds over the course of three days. John Ellis, of Portland Internet Design, will be teaching a Web Warrior series of classes. Whether you're going the traditional route or self-publishing, these classes are all about learning how to get your writing on the web...successfully. John will focus on SEO writing mechanics, increasing site performance, using keywords, and mastering Google+. And yes, he fully expects you to bring your iPad, laptop or smart phone for some hands-on learning.

Other classes include those from popular workshop leaders like Jessica Morrell, Cynthia Whitcomb, Danny Manus, and Larry Brooks, as well as new faces like Seth Jaret and Debra Gwartney.

And the consultants will be there in full force! On the film side, some perennial favorites coming are Luke Ryan, Jacqueline Gault (who is already working with local screenwriters), and returning managers Josh Kesselman and Marc Manus, fresh from the sale of a spec script. For those interested in literary agents and editors, there's a wide and varied range interested in every genre, including Annie Bomke, Linda Epstein, Angela Rinaldi, and John Cusick.

The keynote speaker at the Saturday Night Gala this year is Kelly Willams Brown, the author of Adulting and conference success story. Lunch speakers include Dennis Stovall of Ooligan Press; screenwriter and director Gordy Hoffman, and author Jennifer Lauck.

FiLMLaB has been a huge success this year so far. The Script-to-Screen competition doubled its entries over 2012, and not only will the winning script be made into a movie, but it will also be shown during the FiLMLaB event after the Friday Night Reception. Judges this year included Erik Bork (Emmy and Golden Globe winning writer/editor of Band of Brothers), Stacy Chattaway (Executive Director of Development at LAIKA Entertainment), Zach Cox (Manager at Circle of Confusion – Walking Dead), Mary Cybriwsky (Manager/Producer at Scooty Woop Entertainment), and Luke Ryan (Executive Vice President at Disruption Entertainment). And just to show that even when it’s over it’s not really over, a new opportunity has opened up. A Northwest production company that features short films in many of its projects wants to see vetted scripts from FiLMLaB, so those from the semi-finalists and finalists (both this year's and last's) will be passed on to them.

So come and get inspired! The conference is three days of learning about the craft of writing, getting excited about writing, practicing writing, seeing great accomplishments in writing, talking about writing, and then...yep. Writing some more.

http:/www.willamettewriters.com/wwc/3/

Beyond Craft... Embracing Greatness By Larry Brooks

Oh what a tangled, slippery-sloped, viper-infested, self-sabotaging path we fiction writers tread. What seems so simple -- because we read excellent stories all the time, and they really do seem, well, if not simple, then at least clear and clean, and therefore not beyond our means -- turns out to be anything but.

The blank page both calls to us and mocks us. And so we fill it up with what we have to offer, arising from the pool of what we know, fueled by dreams we dare not utter aloud... sometimes soured by what, either in ignorance or arrogance or simple haste, we've chosen to ignore. Meanwhile, in spite of all the books and workshops and websites and analogy-loving writing gurus out there, we cling to the limiting belief that there are no "rules." The mere mention of that word causes you to rebel, even conclude that principles and standards are really "rules" with polite sensibilities, and from there we decide that we can write our stories any way we please.

Because this is art, damn it.

Often we don't find that out that what we have to offer isn't good enough until the rejection letter arrives. Or the critique group pounces like Simon Cowell on a bad day. Or when a story coach doesn't tell you what you want to hear. As one of the latter, my job involves telling writers -- frequently -- that their story is coming up short, and why. That the wheels fell off, very often at the starting gate. It's the "why" part that allows me to sleep at night, because I've been on my share of the sharp pokes this business delivers. But like a doctor giving a screaming kid a vaccination shot, I take solace in the hope that once the sting subsides the writer will see the pit into which they are about to tumble.

And you can't write your way out of the pit. No, the pit requires avoidance rather than rescue.

The Trouble with Craft

Craft -- the mechanics and architecture and sweat of putting a story together -- is complex, if nothing else than for its sheer immensity. It's anything but simple. Even in those stories that inspire us, bestsellers and favorite authors and even the classics, we're witnessing the symmetry and fluid power of simplicity on the other side -- beyond -- complexity.

In my work I've sought to put fences around it all, create labels and levels and subsets of supersets and connect those dots in ways that facilitate navigation on that aforementioned path. (My friend Randy Ingermanson is nodding now, as he's doing the same thing, and very effectively, with his Snowflake story development model.) Six core competencies, six realms of story physics, and about five dozen subordinated corners of the craft aligned under those twelve flags.

Trouble is -- just like in love and careers and gambling -- you can get them all technically right... and your story can still fall flat. And that's the thing -- the holy grail of "things" we need to understand -- that separates craft from art. Unpublished from published. Frustrating from rewarding. So without minimizing any of the myriad corners and nuances of craft -- indeed, they remain eternal, consistent and the non-negotiable ante-in -- allow me to simplify. To break it down into three buckets, three qualities, three goals, that any successful story will embody to some extent. Three things about your story... things that readers will, upon finishing your story, notice.

Three essences to shoot for. Three qualities to evaluate about your story plan, and then your story execution. Three things to grade yourself on.

If at least one of those grades isn't an "A," then you're not done.

The Fiction Trifecta

One of the reasons I ask my clients to pitch me their concept and their First Plot Point (and why we ask for a synopsis with those first 20 pages for manuscript consults at the WW conference) is that, almost without exception, I can assess two things from the answer: the writer's understanding of these three critical elements, and the potential for the story to deliver them, in whatever combination, with sufficient power and artfulness. Here they are. No surprises here. But be honest, have you really evaluated your story on these things, regarded alone as criteria? Have you asked yourself what your strategy will be to optimize one or more of these things? Now you can.

In no particular order, because each stands alone as a potential windfall:

Intrigue - A story is often a proposition, a puzzle, a problem and a paradox. When you (the reader) find yourself hooked because you just have to know what happens... or whodunnit... or what the underlying answers are... then you've intrigued your reader. It may or may not have an emotional component to it -- mysteries, for example, are usually more intellectual than emotional, they're intriguing because the clues will always lead somewhere, and we want to know where, even see if we can get their first.

Mysteries, as a genre, are almost entirely dependent upon reader intrigue. Not necessary "dramatic intrigue" within the story itself, but rather, the degree to which a reader is "intrigued" with the questions the story is asking.

But this kind of intrigue isn't limited to mysteries. Sometimes the intrigue is delivered by the writing itself. A story without all that must depth or challenge can be a lot of fun, simply because the writer is funny. Or scary. Or poetic. Or brilliant on some level that lends the otherwise mundane a certain relevance and resonance. Make no mistake, this, at is core, is a form of intrigue.

Emotional Resonance - When a story moves you, which so many great stories do, it's because we feel it. It makes us cry. Laugh. It makes us angry. It frightens. It's nostalgic. Important.

Les Miserables isn't the classic it is -- book, stage and now screen -- because we must find out "what happens. No, it works because it makes use cry. John Irving's Cider House Rules is a modern classic because it pushes buttons, makes us choose, forces us to behold the consequences of our choices. Same with The Davinci Code, another modest success. Every love story, every story about injustice and pain and children and reuniting with families and forgiveness -- name your theme -- is dipping into the well of emotional resonance for its power.

Vicarious Experience - reader, meet Harry Potter. Go with him on an adventure to a place you'll never experience otherwise. Or Hans Solo. Or James Bond. Or Sherlock Holmes or Merlin or some alien with an agenda. The juice of these stories isn't the dramatic question or the plucking of your heart strings as much as the ride itself. The places you'll go, the things you'll see, the characters you'll encounter, the things you'll see and do.

Of course, emotional experience can be a ride, as well -- a story about falling in love, or getting fired, or winning the lottery -- and when that happens you've been given an E-ticket on the Slice of Life attraction. These stories strike two of these Trifecta chords by making us feel the experience of falling in love, or feeling loss or simply walking a mile in shoes that seem compellingly familiar.

The common factor here is this: something compelling about the story.

That may seem obvious. But the truth is, and sadly so, it doesn’t translate to pervasive among yet-to-be-published stories.

This sought-after compelling nature resides in various realms of the human experience – intellectually, emotionally, or on some other level (usually the result of a combination of these three gold standards). An allure that resides beyond the tricky or original or otherwise "interesting" nature of its concept.

Your concept, however tricky or original or interesting, isn't compelling until it lands on one or more of those three powerful forces: intrigue... emotional resonance... vicarious experience. A story about aging backwards, about going to another planet, about a secret code... about something conceptual... isn't enough.

Until you juice it with some combination of the Trifecta elements. Until that happens, that's all it is: a concept. And in this business, concepts are commodities.

Which is why a "compelling premise" is only one of the six realms of story physics.

It functions as the stage, the landscape, upon which these truly powerful essences can emerge to transform a story into magic.

Or better stated... into art.

When these three essences become the goal, the criteria of your concept and your craft, then you have a real shot. Because now you're risen above a bevy of concepts -- rehashed, reheated and retreaded -- crowding the inboxes of agents and publishers out there.

They're not looking for the next great "idea." Or even the next great voice.

They're looking for the next great story. And intrinsic to that definition you'll find The Trifecta... three compelling story essences that are waiting to make your story work.

And when it does, it really is art, after all.

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Larry Brooks is a novelist and the author of two bestselling writing books, both from Writers Digest: "Story Physics: Harnessing the Underlying Forces of Storytelling" (2013), and “Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling” (2011 ). His latest novel, "Deadly Faux," will be released by Turner Publishing in October 2013, as well as his five-title backlist, which includes a USA Today Bestseller ("Darkness Bound," 2000) and a Publishers Weekly "Best Books of 2004" ("Bait and Switch," 2004). He is also the creator of Storyfix.com, named Writers Digest Magazine’s “101 Best Writing Websites” for the past two years.

Using Twitter, A Short Guide for Authors New to the Twitter-verse

by Bill Johnson

Twitter is a website (www.twitter.com) that allows people to join and post messages of 140 characters. When you join (it’s free), you can both ‘follow’ others and have ‘followers’ who receive messages you send (this message passed 140 characters with the word followers).

Twitter began as a way for people in a business to send messages (“meeting time changed to 1:30”), but it quickly became a way for people to send ‘tweets’ to friends, acquaintances, or anyone who signed up to follow a particular person.

Which made it of interest to writers looking for a way to promote books, events, blogs on writing, or just to stay in touch with other authors.

Willamette Writers, as an example, follows 2,015 people and has 2115 followers. I use the WW twitter account to send out announcements about WW meetings, activities, and events. But WW started at zero followers.

How do you gain followers?

If you’re a member of Willamette Writers interested in promoting yourself, click on the list of WW followers and find fellow authors to follow. A percentage of people you follow will, in return, follow you back.

(I suggest people limit this to 30 new followers a day. Past a certain point, you’ll get an automated pop up from Twitter saying you’re overdoing it. If you violate too many of Twitter’s guidelines (posted on their website), they will suspend or cancel your account.)

The Willamette Writers bulletin board has a new feature; you can post your name and twitter handle (the WW handle is @wilwrite; my handle is @bjscript) to ask people to follow you. It’s at http://willamettewriters.yuku.com/forums/12/Twitter-Follow.

If you want followers who have a specific interest, say science fiction conventions, you can look up Orycon in the Twitter search function and follow Orycon’s followers.

Personally, when I get new followers who are writers, I try to find a message of theirs I can ‘retweet’. This means I’m passing along someone else’s tweet, so it’s going out in their name, to my followers. Now that I do this, I pick up 10-15 new followers a day.

You can also, if it’s appropriate, copy and paste someone else’s message into a tweet that you send out, so the information goes out in your name. For example, you might pass along the name of the winner of the Oregon Book Award for fiction.

Once you join Twitter, you’ll find that all some authors do is send out messages (sometimes hourly) promoting their books. I do promote my book (A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling), but I also make an effort to pass along information of interest to others writers. Folks I feature for retweets include Jane Friedman (helpful tweets on the world of publishing and self-publishing), Porter Anderson (Porter attends writing conferences and posts about events and workshops), and Grammar Girl (posts about writing).

I also have a general rule: if someone retweets one of my tweets, I retweet one of theirs.

Being retweeted greatly increases the reach of Twitter. I have 3,485 followers. If I send out a tweet that is retweeted by someone with their own list of 3,000 followers, my tweet has now reached 6,000 people.

But… and it’s a big butt… the more followers someone has, the faster those short tweets accumulate and pass out of sight. So, if I follow one person who follows me, and we send each other one tweet a day, we’ll each see our tweets all day. But when I send out a tweet to 3,000 people, who also have their own lists into the thousands, I’ve found that a promotional tweet with a link gets 30-60 hits.

You can see the value, then, of tweeting something that is retweeted. That’s why I post tweets about articles on writing I have posted at my website at http://www.storyispromise.com.

You can also post live links in a tweet, or include a photo (which counts against your 140 characters). Here’s an example of a recent WW tweet,

Registration information about the 2014 Willamette Writers conference Aug 1-3 PDX is available at http://www.willamettewriters.com/wwcon

(Feel free to tweet this announcement).

If you’re counting characters, you’ll notice this is longer than 140. Twitter will automatically shorten a link (as long as it includes the http://www).

Of course, for most of us, jobs, responsibilities, family, movies, and sleep take up much of our days. The great solution to that is a program called Twuffer (http://www.twuffer.com). Twuffer is a free program that allows you to schedule tweets in advance. I can schedule a tweet to run, say, at 3 am and another at 6 am, when I’m normally asleep (or abnormally awake; or Abby Normal, to YF fans).

You can also add a Hashtag to a tweet; that's a complicated name for using the pound sign, #. For example, if you are doing a book promotion on Amazon, you could add the hashtag #Kindle or #FREE or #Mystery. Anyone who types in the word Mystery in a search will more easily find your tweet. In 2011, WW used the hashtag #WWCon11 to help people attending the conference 'find' each other on twitter. This year we're using #WWCon13.

Twitter allows you to post a profile, which can include a link to a website and a photo or logo. If you're an author, it's important that you have a quality head shot or a good image of a book cover. What you post in your profile will help others find you. I have come across profiles so vague or cryptic, I wasn't sure if it was a profile for an author. Sometimes you can be too clever.

Once you start putting yourself out there in the twitter-verse, be aware you’ll get followers offering to get you thousands of new followers for $100 or less. Avoid this. You get computer generate ghosts (for more about this, Google the topic). You’ll also find yourself being ‘followed’ by people with services they want you to buy (you don’t have to follow them back) or people offering sexual services (you can block unwanted followers).

You can send a DM or direct message to people on twitter if you want to comment on someone’s tweet or introduce yourself, but DO NOT send DMs to strangers promoting your novel. Your account will soon be suspended or cancelled for sending out spam.

If you follow someone and discover it’s not the right fit for you, you can easily unfollow folks, but avoid following and unfollowing large numbers of people in the same day. It violates Twitter’s guidelines. You can use a program called ManageFlitter (www.managerfllitter.com) to find and unfollow people who rarely tweet or who don’t follow you back.

Personally, I unfollow anyone who tells me what they had for breakfast. If I wasn’t there, I don’t care.

You will come across people who have 50,000 plus followers. I would probably marry someone sight unseen to have access to that list, but that’s a topic for another day.

Twitter is not the be-all, end all for book promotion, but it is a tool that has its place, especially with a program like Twuffer to help with scheduling. And, there are many other tools (use Lists on Twitter to organize followers) and apps like Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) that allow you to easily track what's happening with your tweets and followers.

Twitter can seem daunting from a distance, and time consuming, but using a few simple tools can make it a more productive experience.

Good luck, and happy tweeting.

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Bill Johnson is the author of A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, available on AmazonKindle for $2.99 and on Smashwords. He teaches workshops to writing around the US. He is currently the office manager for Willamette Writers, a group in the Pacific Northwest with 1,650 members.

Should you pitch to more than one title at a time? The Pros and Cons of simultaneous and multiple submissions by Roy Stevenson

In today’s competitive freelance writing arena the practice of submitting simultaneous query letters to magazine editors has become necessary to survive.

Traditionally, freelance writers would send out a query letter or email to a magazine and wait to hear back from the editor. After a few weeks when the editor sends a rejection email, or doesn’t bother responding (which is the norm today—more and more editors simply don’t have the time to send out rejections), the writer then sends out the same query letter to the next magazine editor on his list, and waits again to hear back from that editor. And so on.

This process takes months or years before the writer has exhausted his list of potential magazines, or finally gets lucky and has an article accepted.

This process is clearly set up to avoid the discomfiture of having more than one editor pick up the story, and old school writers doggedly stick to this system, fretting and worrying about what they would do if more than one editor wanted their article.

This system is simply not practical in today’s market for freelancers trying to earn a living, and I think the spectre of having more than one editor pick up a story is simply a non-issue. I think freelancers should be sending out simultaneous queries for every story. Using simultaneous queries has resulted in a 90% acceptance rate for my articles!

With my system, I send my query out simultaneously to as many magazines that I think my article would be a good fit for. I do this by creating extensive distributions lists with the editor’s names and contact details for all the magazines in the genres that I write for. This includes magazines in all other English-speaking countries. The number of magazines on my various distributions lists ranges from five to seventy five, and includes magazines in England, U.S.A, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

After creating an enticing query letter, I send it out to every editor on that list. Then I sit back and wait for an acceptance email. Inevitably my story idea—if halfway decent— will resonate enough with an editor somewhere around the world for him or her to accept my story for publication.

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Roy Stevenson is a professional freelance travel writer based in Seattle, Washington. With more than 800 articles published in 180 regional, national, and international magazines, newspapers, in-flights and online travel magazines, Roy is one of the most prolific travel writers in the U.S.A. www.roy-stevenson.com His website www.pitchtravelwrite.com is aimed at helping travel writers with their marketing.