Kentucky Writers Conference

Got an idea for a nonfiction book or memoir? Before you invest months or years writing it, hold up! Nonfiction publishing isn’t like the fiction market—you don’t need to have a completed manuscript before querying agents. New York Times bestseller Andrew Shaffer—author of two nonfiction titles for HarperCollins—will help you turn your idea into a slickly-formatted book proposal.

In “Writing That First Draft,” Wendy discusses what writers need to know about starting that writing process. Some of the topics she goes over in the workshop includes: Getting Started: Attitude Matters; Courting Inspiration; and Sketching the Big Picture That First Draft: Character &; Conflict; Whose Story Is It?; Where Do I Begin? Revise, Revise, Revise: Start With the Big Rocks; Avoid Common Problems; Finding Your Beta Reader Now What?: Submit or Self Publish?

A workshop on poetry as a form of resistance and recovery, with a specific focus on the work of June Jordan. We will also deal with subject matter, tone, and imagined and real interlocutors in poetry.

In this workshop we will examine various strategies to plot fiction, particularly mysteries or thrillers. Attention will be paid to developing an idea across plot points as well as examination of the arc of the story. We will work through various methods of tracking plot – including Excel spread sheets and more traditional note cards and posters.

Get ready to empty the pockets, drawers, and glove compartments. In this fiction workshop, we’ll create inventories to enrich character development. We’ll learn how the physical characteristics of a character (eye color, hair style, height) are much less important to readers’ understanding than the objects the characters encounter and with which s/he interacts. Inventory is where action and characterization meet, making it an essential part of plot.

So you’ve started writing your novel, but how do you get it finished? How do you know if it’s any good? How can you motivate yourself to keep going? Join Catherine McKenzie for a workshop on tools to move past the beginning of your novel and get it done.

It’s easy to underestimate how much conflict you need to hook your readers (spoiler alert: you need A LOT). Alma Katsu will teach you how to layer different types of conflict to create a compelling story that readers won’t be able to put down, no matter the genre.

How to write from where you are, or where you’ve been. Using examples from contemporary poets, discussion of how poets use language, image, detail, metaphor to convey the living essence of a place. Practical ideas for more fully seeing, expressing, and discovering the life of a place through poetry.

Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, a big part what gives your narrative voice and makes it your own, are the details you include. But how many do you need, and how do you know which ones are best? With a crash course on Charles Baxter’s ideas on “defamiliarization,” we’ll look at some seminal works that get the details just right, and we’ll do a few exercises to see if we can’t start getting them right ourselves.

The age of the computer and the Internet has led to an explosion of outlets for short fiction.  Literally several thousand journals, both in print and on line, offer respectable venues for publication.  How should an aspiring author choose among them? And what are the secrets to success in the publication game? In this session, an author who has garnered more than two hundred acceptance letters and 20,000 rejection slips in the course of his efforts to publish short fiction offers his “tricks of the trade” on such subjects as market selection and submission, contests, cover letters, “best of” anthologies, red flags, how to build a portfolio that will appeal to agents, and how to market a collection.  The purpose of this session is to demystify the submission and selection process, ultimately leading to a more impressive acceptance to submission ratio.  While writing is an art, publishing short fiction is as much a science as a creative endeavor–one that the determined and informed student can master.  After devoting so much time, energy and emotion to creating short fiction, why should an author leave publication to chance?

Ella Fitzgerald once said, “Don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” Meet a 64-year-old writer who, after a rewarding career in law, and after raising three children, never gave up on her dream to become a published author. She is proud to call herself a ‘mature writer.’ Her hope is to inspire other mature writers not to give up on their dreams of publication in the midst of a business that often seems more favorable towards youth. She will offer practical tips to others for whom writing might be a second, third, or even fourth career, to help them enter, survive, and thrive in the jungle of traditional publishing.

Learn how to write a query or book blurb that will captivate agents, editors, and readers! Experienced teacher and bestselling author C.J. Redwine breaks the query writing process down into a simple, 3 step method, and answers all of your query-related questions. Bring a copy of your current query to participate in C.J.’s anonymous, on-the-spot critiques as time permits.