Contest and writers conference: "Go home and write"

We gathered in Huntsville at the annual conference of the Alabama Writers Conclave to learn more about the craft of writing and to get our awards.

The “we” are writers -- folks who like to put words on paper and tell stories, through fiction or non-fiction, poems or humor. There are a few professionals in the bunch – people who have mostly earned a living by writing and communication, like me -- but this group is generally made up of folks who love the language and are willing, even compelled, to do the work and experience the sometimes-joy that is writing. There are executives and retirees, teachers, attorneys and sales people, all who close the door and write, because they love it, are good at it and have stories to tell.

At the AWC annual conference, we pile into rooms and learn about dialogue, showing, telling and playing with time in fiction, editing poems, op-eds, and that elusive “writer’s voice.”

Members can also pay a small fee and have a formal critique of a piece of work. I had my novel, first chapter, critiqued by our featured speaker, a rabbi with 24 non-fiction books to his credit. Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Ph.D, who spoke to us on topics including “What would Jesus Tweet? The Power of Writing Short,” told me I was giving away too much too soon in the second draft of my Southern, magic-laced novel. But, he liked it and the characters he met in the first 10 pages. So, I am revising, again.

Also, the AWC has an annual writing contest, a literary competition, in which folks enter from all over the U.S. and, this year, also Canada and Brazil.

This blogger placed in the humor category for Three Generations and Kid Rock: Seeing it in Color, and I was an excited as a kid with an all-As report card when I got my certificate. Now I can and will say I am an Alabama Writers Conclave literary competition award winner.

Selected works from the winners of each year’s contest are featured in AlaLit.com, posted on the AWC website. Here is the link, where my blog post on going to see Kid Rock with Granma, daughter and niece, which is about several posts back, is featured on page 184.

http://alalit.com/
Alalit.com is good reading. I’ll point you to:

• The winner of novel, first chapter, by Hank Henley, a scholastic book sales executive. It’s a stunningly clever first chapter that makes me want to see Hank get this published. We all want to get published.

• The first chapter, novel, by my new writer friend Jo Wharton Heath, a retired mathematics professor at Auburn University (my alma mater). The piece is called The Man in the Blue Demin Shirt.

• And, check out the humor piece by Birmingham Judge Debra Goldstein, about legal matters at a long-running mah-jongg group. U.S. Administrative Judge Goldstein published her first novel this year, a mystery called Maze in Blue.
When you have the time, check out Alalit.com, and let these folks tell you some stories.

I learned a lot at the meeting, and came back with tactics and knowledge I didn’t have before, plus revisions in my head and a renewed determination to “shut the door and write one word at a time” as Stephen King advises me from the post-it note on my computer.

A final word from the out-going AWC president Greg Screws, who is a television newman in Huntsville, summed it up. He said, “Go home and write.”