Battery Charger: League of Utah Writers Spring Workshop

Twice a year I get my writing batteries charged by attending League of Utah Writers writing events. This past weekend I spent a marvelous afternoon at the Spring workshop, which was held on the Taylorsville campus of Salt Lake Community College. The excellent sessions I attended included POW!, which was a stimulating presentation on how to write effective, fast-paced action scenes. This was a particularly useful class for me because my second novel will include a number of fight scenes and battle scenes. It is, after all, about the war between the Nephites and the Gadiantons. What is a war without some good fight scenes, right?

I also attended a wonderful presentation on Voice. "Voice" is the term for how a writer says something. Facts have no voice. "It rained on Tuesday" is a fact that has no voice. "The gloomy skies poured like Niagra Falls on the second Monday of the longest week of my life" not only provides the facts but tells the reader how the writer feels about the facts. That is Voice.

The third session I sat in on was a lively presentation by J. Scott Savage on Pacing. Plot is what happens in the story. Pacing is when it happens. He showed that many popular stories and movies all follow a standard pace that breaks up the story into four parts. Part One introduces the characters and sets up the rest of the story with a minor conflict that isn't really the story but hooks the reader anyway. Part Two sets the characters on a quest, but it is the wrong quest. At the end of Part Two the characters learn something that tells them they are on the wrong path. Part Three sets the characters on the true quest. Tensions build and pressures mount. This part ends with the Aha! moment when the characters finally figure out what is really going on. Part Four is the climax and resolution. It is amazing how common this four-part pacing is in popular fiction and drama.

The last session I attended was a panel discussion about Revising. This was the best session of all for me. I listened to six professional authors debate over processes, such as whether to use "beta readers". It was fascinating to see successful authors disagree about how they go about their craft, which says that no one way is best. They all agreed on one principle, however: the fastest way to improve one's own writing is to critique others' writing. Their suggestions gave me a whole new perspective on my local League chapter. None of us are qualified to critique another writer's work, but we are all trying to learn together, and that makes it valuable.

So now that my batteries are charged, I am plunging with new vigor into writing In the Days of Lachoneus: Book 2 The Battle. The first order of business is to revise the very first scene of the first chapter, which is a fight to the death between two hated enemies. POW!