KY Christian Writers Conference Report

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Great faculty, great keynotes, and a great location add up to a wonderful conference experience for around 75 writers this past weekend. If you aren’t familiar with KCWC, take a look at the Web site.

Virginia Smith did an outstanding job as keynote speaker with a pothole-by-pothole description of her road to publication. Beginners and published writers alike enjoyed two days of networking, learning, and worship.

I taught a workshop entitled, “Get Organized—And Sell Your Work.” Some of the information in my session is included in a series of blog posts. See the summary and links to each post on this page.

If you’re reading this, and you were a KCWC attendee, I encourage you to subscribe so that you won’t miss the book giveaway coming soon.

Writers Conferences: Guide to Publication

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Kentucky Christian Writers Conference begins Friday, and I’m getting more excited by the minute. I’ve been on the organizing committee for KCWC for the past four years. Last year, about 50% of the attendees were first-timers, total newbies. We try really hard to help the beginners. They come so that they can get as much information as possible, but they invariably end up glassy-eyed, suffering from information overload. I view them with great sympathy because I remember my first conference.

In the summer of 1999, I attended my first conference, Southern Christian Writers Conference at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Somehow, an announcement about the conference reached my local newspaper in Union City, Tennessee. I managed to locate some other West Tennessee writers who were attending SCWC, so I decided to go with them. I had no idea what I would learn or what I would do with the information. I just knew that I liked to write and had been told that I was good at it. I wanted to explore the possibilities. Continue reading →

Dealing with Rejection

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Been rejected lately? If not, you are probably not working hard enough. The majority of freelance writers receive more rejections than acceptances. It’s just a fact of life. Speakers at writers’ conferences always offer their tips on dealing with it. Also, there’s a lot of info on the Internet about it. Many of the articles address the emotional side of handling rejection. The primary advice I glean from these sources are as follows:

  • Don’t take it personally. There are many reasons your work was not accepted. Notice I didn’t use the word “rejection.” Doesn’t “not accepted” sound better to you? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Why Am I Here?

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Today’s guest post is by Cassandra Wessel, a writer of devotionals and poetry whose work has been published in the Presbyterian Church of Canada’s Daily Devotionals. She responded to my request for Christian writers to share their experience at their first writers’ conference. Visit her Web site for more information.

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My alarm clock roused me, but a stuffy head and sore throat made me want to throw it across the room. Instead, I hit snooze for ten more minutes of sleep. When it sounded again, I rolled over and thudded to the floor. Moaning, I staggered to the shower where streams of scalding water revived me. After a breakfast of strong coffee, egg and toast, I packed a lunch and headed out.

I was bound for the St. David’s Writing Success XIX Conference in Stoneboro, PA, a two hour drive through dense fog. I arrived—late. I caught the tail-end of the keynote address, then went to the Beginners group. There I learned heaps about manuscript content, formatting and point of view in spite of a runny nose that rivaled the Allegheny River at flood stage. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Writing for Publication—and Servanthood

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Dianne E. Butts has over 250 publications in more than fifty Christian print magazines and seventeen books. Her articles have been republished in Great Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Canada, and Korea. She speaks to writers groups, teaches at Christian writers conferences, and offers her monthly e-zine to writers for free. For your free subscription use the sign-up box at www.DianneEButts.com. To follow the progress of her upcoming book, stay tuned to www.DeliverMeBook.blogspot.com. The following article is reprinted from her e-zine with her permission.

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I had a couple of interesting conversations with writers lately. One lady contacted me because she noticed the local writers group and she was thinking she might like to join. Though I encouraged her to come to the writing group, she seemed shy and uncertain. Finally she confessed what was really on her mind. She said she wasn’t sure it was right to call attention to herself through writing. She was concerned about becoming prideful about writing in a way that would be unbecoming for a Christian.

I had to be careful in my response, because I didn’t want to laugh out loud. That might have come off as rude.

I asked her what she meant about calling attention to herself. She looked confused. I asked her if she thought if she started writing that everyone would then know her and she would be famous. She kind of, sort of indicated yes. I asked her if she had read any magazine articles lately. She said yes. I asked her who wrote them. She said she didn’t know. I wondered if she’d read anything else lately. Articles online? Newspaper? Book? Would she have remembered any of these writers’ names? My bet is if she could have remembered any, it would have been the name of a book’s author. Continue reading →

Get Organized: Evaluating Your Progress

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The final step in organizing your writing effort is periodic evaluation—measuring your progress and making adjustments. You may choose to evaluate monthly, quarterly, or annually. Just resolve to do it.

Review your intentions: Take a look at the goals you set for yourself. Did you accomplish any of the short-term goals? How are you progressing on the long-term goals? The more specific your goals, the easier it is to measure success. As an example, if you stated that you wanted to submit one article per week, this goal is easily measured by counting your submissions. At the monthly mark, you should have sent out four submissions. If you’re behind on your quota, you can make it up before the next evaluation date. Vague goals like “submitting as many articles as I can” aren’t easily measured. You can excuse a low submission count by citing distractions or unforeseen circumstances. Continue reading →

Get Organized: Time Management

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“Write for at least one hour every day.” I heard this a lot at my first few writers’ conferences. Of course, writers will write every day. And, why only one hour? Shouldn’t you write all the time? The fact is, writing your content is not all you have to do. Besides knowing the writing craft, you must spend time studying the markets, scoping out the “competition,” researching subject matter, meeting other writers and editors, and keeping your efforts organized.

If you devote full-time to your writing career, you may spend as much as an hour each day doing these additional writer jobs. If you consider yourself part-time, organize your time, either daily or weekly, to perform each of the following functions. Continue reading →

Get Organized: State Your Intentions

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Getting organized involves more than collecting your tools and managing your time. All of that effort is wasted if you don’t have clear intentions for your work. Ask yourself these questions as you plan your writing career

What are your goals for your writing? Organizations and individuals spend a lot of time developing goals and objectives to make their work more effective. A writer should have the same concern. If you don’t know what your goal is, you have no way to measure success.

Do you want to publish a book? The steps to publication for a published writer will be different from those of an unpublished writer. As you set your goals, be sure they are realistic. Miracles do happen, but it usually takes years, even decades, to see that first book in print. Attend conferences and learn what it takes to reach your goal. Then, set your sub-goals with your time constraints in mind.

For the Christian writer—do the goals you’ve set coincide with what God wants for your writing? The best resource on this topic is a book that is out of print. Published in 1983 and 1988, Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All That God Wants You to Do is not specifically for writers, but I highly recommend it. Porter outlines a time management method for Christians that includes several chapters on goal-setting. See my review of this book here. Continue reading →

Get Organized: Records

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Once your work space is set up, you need to organize subject matter, submission tracking, finances, and communications. For topics covered in previous blog posts, I provide a link to those posts in the text below.

Subject matter/content: If you write in more than one genre, make files for each genre in the beginning. As your collection grows, you will need to make sub-categories. For example, master category might be Nonfiction with subcategories Devotionals, Articles, or Book Ideas.

Other filing system ideas can be found here and here.

Submission Tracking: This is possibly the most critical organizing task for a writer, especially if you send simultaneous submissions. It’s also necessary for managing reprints. My previous post describes several methods, including a free Excel file I created for this purpose. See the full post here.
Continue reading →

Get Organized: Your Writing Place

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How can anything about your writing be organized if you don’t have a place to write? A place to store your records and resources? Today, I’m sharing with you how I’ve organized my writing space.

Ten years ago, when I first started writing for publication, I set up my computer and file cabinet in an unused upstairs bedroom. I could hide out in there and work undisturbed. However, it was too inconvenient to the rest of the house. I had to go downstairs frequently for breaks, household chores, and just plain interruptions.

Finally, I bought a desk for our den, thinking I could work on the computer and not be far from my other responsibilities while writing. The biggest challenge with this plan was where to put supplies and reference materials. I still wanted the room to be a den, but I needed to have handy storage. Continue reading →