Writer's Conference Recap #2

I’m going to jump from class one to class five for, this my next installment of the conference recap. I have no real reason for doing this, I just thought I’d mix things up a bit.

The title of this class was “From Idea to Story: the care and feeding of an idea (workshop)” with Alton Gansky. The discussion in class covered 17 areas. I’m not going to go into detail on each area but will just list them so you have an idea of what was covered.

1. The greatest moments in a writer’s life.
2. The most common question asked of novelist.
3. Where do ideas come from?
4. Turning “What ifs” into plots.
5. Settings
6. Maturing the “What if”. Let it grow and expand.
7. Develop real characters.
8. What your protagonist must be.
9. What your antagonist must be/have.
10. Supporting and minor characters.
11. Complicate their lives.
12. Lead to a strong climax.
13. Resolve all issues.
14. The Plot.
15-16. Outlining
17. Intuitive writing.

As you can see a lot of information was discussed in this class that was short on time and because time ran out before the information did I had to miss from points 15 through 17 because of another appointment on the too crammed schedule I couldn’t be late for. However, it was a good class and I enjoyed what parts I didn’t miss.

Points two and three listed here are the same question and are actually the topic that prompted my start of this blog in the first place and to see my answer to these you can go back to my very first blog entry. Alton had a different take on this question however, that I found very interesting, he didn’t actually answer the question of where you get ideas but rather answers by saying that “ideas aren’t the problem, time is”. Now I may be a little confused here but I don’t really see where this answer has anything to do with the question. Then he gives another answer and it is another question, “what if?” In other words he is saying that ideas come from this question, “what if” _____ (fill in the blank), happened, and the story is the answer to this question. That leads me to ask yet another question, where does the idea for the “what if” come from?

Anyway, overall I enjoyed the class and got a lot of useful information out of it.