Romance Writers of America National Conference ended last night in San Antonio, TX. I did not get to go this year, but I was able to grab nuggets from some of the workshops via Twitter live Feeds.
Twitter?
Thanks to many generous and social media savvy authors attending the conference, I was able to pick up notes from several workshops on promo, conflict, and world building. Of course, it meant watching the feed for an hour but looking at what I gathered! It was worth it.
I favorited those really choice tweets that I wanted to review time and time again, but for the most part, I just jotted down notes by topic, date and time. Once the recordings are available, I’ll purchase those recordings to complete the topics and catch what I miss.
Here are some of the notes I gathered from Rita Award Winning Author Sarah MacLean’s workshop on conflict:
- Conflict drives the romance by keeping the hero and heroine together, but also apart.
- Take out any conflict that doesn’t bring the H/H together.
- Insurmountable odds are those moments that make your reader breathless.
- Every resolution of the conflict (in the middle) creates further complications.
Here are some of the notes from the Promo workshop by Catherine Bybee:
- Keep yourself visible without being spam. You can talk about reviews, cross promote with other authors.
- Don’t let a week go by without being online some way, some how.
- Sell yourself and your voice
- Think outside the box and use your writing talent.
Here’s some notes from the world building workshop by Louisa Edwards:
- Be judicious in seeding details for future books/characters in the series.
- Start a series bible with the first book.
- Plot points in earlier books become world rules in later books. Be aware of this
- If you must info dump, have the most humorous characters convey the information.
Those are just a few examples. The beauty of twitter is you can go back and look things up by hashtags and users for the most part. Sarah’s workshop had the hashtags #conflict #rwa14. Catharine’s had #promo #rwa14. I also added Catharine’s name to the search to screen out actual promo.
It doesn’t replace being there. It brings out my inner geekness, but at least for one hour on a Saturday I was able to get a good jolt of craft information to fuel my writing.