On March 21st and 22nd I attended the Writer’s Digest Editors Intensive in Cincinnati OH. The conference was a two day event. The first day was a full day seminar on writing and the second day was a one on one critique of your first 50 pages by a professional editor.
Obviously having a professional editor look at your work is a great hook and the reason I signed up for the conference. The surprising thing was how much I got out of the class on Saturday. I thought that the class would be a diversion for the main event, a one on one critique that had my heart pounding and palms sweating every time I thought about it. It wasn’t, it was really informative and changed the way I was thinking about getting published. The instructor for most of the day was Jane Friedman who did an excellent job of teaching a diverse group of people about how to use the internet to advance their writing careers. As I am a self professed geek and computer guy I am ashamed to admit that I hadn’t even begun to think about using the social networking sites out there to get my writing career going.
So now I am setting up my Facebook, writing this blog. Tweeting on twitter and developing a platform for myself to stand on and be seen above the crowd. Obviously this is all a big process but one that isn’t really that much work and hopefully will help me get published, which after all is the ultimate goal.
The review with the editor went extremely well. Overall he liked my work, had a few key suggestions for improving it and gave me a written critique. Considering how nervous I was before meeting the editor this was an awesome experience. I had expected him to shred my work, tear it apart, tell me everything was wrong. Before going in I had completely rewritten the first 50 pages again in my head, mercilessly chopping out more pages. Ironically the first comment my reviewer had was to add in something I had edited out before submitting it. That was invaluable to me. I fear that when I’m editing my own work I am overly critical and cut out too much. Scott proved that fear had some basis. Does that mean I shouldn’t cut anything out, no, absolutely not but I need to keep my fears in check while editing.
I have been working on my editing and finishing my book for a while now. I think the Editor’s Intensive showed the road I need to be travelling on to getting it done and getting it out there. For that I think that the experience was invaluable.
-Lystra
