Spend a day with me talking writing

Hanging with Jama in 2012.

I volunteer on the planning committee of the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, Indiana.  I met the magnificent agent, Caren (Johnson) Estesen, who sold WEARING to Wiley at the conference in 2007.  Now I enjoy helping other writers on their writing journeys.

I’ve keynoted at the conference, led breakout sessions, moderated panels, and in general done whatever Jama, the director, has asked me to do. But this marks the first year that I’m leading an intensive session during Part I of the conference.  I’m really pumped! 

The MWW blog interviewed me about the intensive.  (And when I say they I mean that I interviewed myself.)

In the interview I declare I’m jealous of fiction writers and make a money back guarantee like some TV ad man huckster. The crazy thing is that I’m not selling anything, and I don’t even know if I’m getting paid to teach the session.  MWW is a nonprofit, so no one has a financial interest in it, other than that we want to help writers. If I do get paid, it will be the same if 1 or 1,000 students show up. I put on my huckster hat because I really want people to come because I think I can really help you define and realize your writing goals.

Here’s what I say about my session Turning Real Stories into a Real Career:

The bar for nonfiction writing is rather low. We’ll talk about how to exceed expectations and share a few tools from fiction writing. We want your work to stand out. You have to write well before anyone will publish anything.

Next, we’ll explore why you write, and how to discover your unique areas of expertise. And then, we’ll lay out a plan of who you’ll pitch (agents, newspapers, magazines, websites, etc), how you want to be published, and set tangible writing and career development goals.

We’ll work through a writer’s business plan and we might even bust out a spreadsheet or two.

Writing careers rarely happen by accident.

You can read the rest of the interview on the Midwest Writers Blog.

And you can register for my session and the conference here.