Day 1

The first day (or night, as it was last evening) of the Central Coast Writer's Conference was AMAZING!!!

To start off with, I got to see a ton of people that I knew. My best friend's cousin, a friend from church, a former instructor and a very good writer friends. Also, the key note speaker was AMAZING! His name is Christian Moerk and he is from Denmark. His new book, Darling Jim, is pretty popular now, so if you look him up, I'm sure that you'll find it. He was witty and sarcastic, all that you could want in a good author. He called people out on dumb questions and answered the good ones in good humor. Most of all, he gave good pointers and he was very firm about the fact that you need to write every day. I felt that he was the best speaker I've seen in the 3 years that I've been to this conference.

Then, my good writer friend and I skipped off to the lecture of the night. The one we had signed up for was about story structure and, I am happy to say, I am going about outlining my novel the right way. According to the author who was instructing us, there are seven steps to outlining a basic story, seven steps that all stories have:

1. The weakness and the need. The weakness can be based off of the need, such as character lashing out due to their unawareness of their need.
2. Desire. This needs to be deeply connected with the need of the character in some way. The character knows of his or her desire but not of his or her need.
3. Opponent. This cannot be the character; normally it is some tangible force that the character is struggling against.
4. Plan. This involves how the character is going to go about defeating the opponent and achieving his or her desire.
5. Battle. This is the big finale, and can be resolved with an actual action or just words.
6. Self Revelation. This normally takes place during the battle when the character finally realizes his or her need.
7. New Equilibrium. This is the ending, how the character ends up. It could be anything from happy, sad, not getting the need, getting the need, dead, getting what they want but not being happy, not getting what they want but being happy... the list goes on and on. Every book needs this.

So, what was cool about this was that I was able to outline this in all three of my main characters. Since my novel is told in three perspectives, all three characters have to have their own need, weakness, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self revelation, and new equilibrium. I know what all of those are now!!!

This is turning out to be a VERY benificial conference. I'm glad I came.

Well, off to get coffee and get ready!