All you have to do is glance at the twitter feed for the SCBWI Winter Conference in NYC (#ny11scbwi) to know that Sara Zarr seriously rocked the house.  There have been numerous recap posts about her talk.  My favorites include:

Jenny Torres Sanchez [Read. Write. Suffer.]  Sara Zarr at SCBWI–VALIDATION!

Candy Gourlay [Notes from the Slushpile] NYC 2011: Sara Zarr gives the speech she wanted to hear.

Now it’s been two weeks since the conference and as I sit down to write this post, I can’t shake that feeling of dread… that feeling that no matter what I write here, it could never do justice to the AWESOME that was Sara Zarr’s actual speech.  With that in mind, I have come to the conclusion that I will not do a recap.  Yes, I have pages and pages of notes.  Yes, I could give you a long list of all the amazing things she said.  But I could never manage to recreate the energy that filled the room while she said it.  So rather than try and fail miserably, I will simply try something else.

“The answer is in the work.”  Even as I write this post, I realize how true Sara Zarr’s statement is.  The answer isn’t some elusive thing floating out in the ether.  The answer is in the work.  All the things Sara Zarr listed as being essential to a fulfilling creative life are simply ways of taking the focus from neurotic writer-selves and channeling it toward the work.

Here are some of the qualities that Sara Zarr mentioned that lead to a fulfilling creative life (and obstacles that get in our way):

• Sustainable
• Engaging (as opposed to Disenchanting)
• Invites Company but Knows When to Send Company Away (as opposed to Inviting the WRONG Company)
• Faith-Based (as opposed to having a Lack of Faith)
• Gives Back (as opposed to being Self-Obsessed)
• Practice and Craft are central (as opposed to emphasizing Process or the Commodification of Creativity)

As I look down that list, I realize that writers will tap into all of the qualities of a fulfilling creative life the moment they focus on loving the work.  If you love the work, it will sustain you and engage you even when the people around you are not supportive.  If you love the work, you’ll invite good company into your circle of trust and send the bad company away.  If you love the work, you’ll have faith that someday, good things will happen even if the present moment kind of stinks.

“The true goal to strive for is to love doing the work.”  ~Sara Zarr

Notice also that all the obstacles that oppose those good qualities of a fulfilling creative life can get knocked down the minute we start loving the work.  If we love the work, it’s hard to be self-obsessed or to commodify our creativity.  The work will have inherent meaning to us, not just meaning defined by what other people think of our work.

Ultimately, writers need to love doing the work and believe that there’s enough generosity in the universe to go around.  In the words of Flannery O’Connor: “People without hope do not write novels.”

In closing, there is a line in that movie Pushing Tin, and it sums up the writing experience for me.  This one air traffic controller is returning to work after having a meltdown and his therapist has given him a mantra: “It’s a big sky, there’s lots of room.”

I feel like that mantra captures the writing life beautifully.  This isn’t a zero-sum game.  OK, it might be if your end-goal is to have a #1 bestseller or win some prestigious award–but that doesn’t necessarily make for a fulfilling creative life (and can lead to a lot of stress and neuroses).  But if the goal is to love doing the work, then there’s plenty of good stuff in the universe to go around.  It’s a big sky.  There’s plenty of room for everybody.

OK, I’ll admit it.  When I was in school (and college and grad school) I was seriously guilty of turning in work before revising it.  Sure, I would do a quick spell-check and maybe give it a once-over for grammar, but rarely did I ever roll up my sleeves and do serious revision.

Now that I have a draft of my book done, I find myself in the middle of the revision process and I totally realize why I was resistant to revision before: it’s flippin’ scary.  This is why I was so thrilled to hear James Scott Bell speak about the revision process at the Writer’s Digest Conference.  I was particularly excited to attend his talk because I am a huge fan of his book The Art of War for Writers.  Here are some of the sparkly nuggets I took away from this session.

Principles of Revision

1)  Write hot, revise cool.  Revision allows you to add rational choices and strategy to the frantic bursts of creativity that came out in the first draft.  Take at least two weeks (maybe longer) after writing your draft to let it cool down before you revise.

2)  You need to finish first.  Nothing you write is etched in stone… you can always come back and make it better later on.  The only thing you can’t do is revise a blank page.  Finish first.

3)  Do a first read-through.  Try to recreate a reading experience so that you’re not focused on the fact that you’re reading your own book.  Make minimal notes.  Tip from Gabi:  I put my book on my Kindle and have been reading it there so that it feels more like a “real book” and not just a draft on printed computer pages.  I use the footnote function on the Kindle to make my notes, and since I’m lazy about taking notes on Kindle, it forces me to make my notes short.

4)  Summarize your changes.  Write a 2000 word summary of your draft with the new adjustments you just noted.  Tip from Gabi: You can also try extracting an outline from the first draft, as a way of getting a handle on what you have written.  Then adjust the outline according to the notes you made in your read-through and implement those changes in the draft.

Things to Think About in Revision

Character:  The characters need to jump off the page.  Here are a few exercises to help you with this:

• Try creating some “off-screen” scenes where you see what the character would do in crazy situations.  
• Do the “opposite exercise” where you have the character do the opposite of what you’d expect, then figure out why they did that.

Remember, even at the very beginning, try to give the reader an inkling that the character has the potential for change.

Opening:  As Bell put it: “Cut out the parts that people skip.”  Start the story where things get interesting.  Also, make trouble for your characters from the start.  Readers become engaged with the characters at the first sign of conflict.

Dialogue:  Compress the dialogue and extend the action.  Get rid of exposition and ramp up the conflict.  Even if characters are on the “same side” they should still have some kind of conflict between them.

Take-Home Message

Ultimately, revision is where you add the strategic element to your story.  Now that you know who the characters are and what’s going to happen, you can plant foreshadowing moments and hint at themes that will be important later on.  You can’t do all this in your first draft because during that stage of the process you don’t know your characters or the story completely.  It’s only once you know the ending and who your characters are at their core that you can manipulate the story in a strategic way.

Much as my brain understands all the amazing benefits of revision, I still find myself having trouble because I keep psyching myself out. 

Help!  Do you have any revision tips I can borrow?

There are 4 main areas in IP (intellectual property) law.  These are: patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.

Patents:  Protect an invention.
Copyrights:  Protect artistic expression.
Trademarks:  Protect brand names and symbols.
Trade Secrets:  As long as you don’t tell the secret, it stays protected.
(Example: the Coca-Cola formula is a trade secret.)

For authors, the most relevant area of IP law is copyright.  Here are some of the basic things you should know.

Copyright is a property right which insures that someone else will not take your artistic expression and claim it as their own.

Copyright covers various forms of artistic expression.  This includes music (both composition and recordings), dramatic works (plays, dance, opera), visual arts (painting, sculpture, illustration), and film/TV.  Of course, the most relevant category for writers is written expression, which is also covered by copyright.

This is a tricky question because the law changes frequently.  (The running legal joke is that length of copyright follows the “Mickey Mouse rule” in that coverage is extended continually so that lovable cartoon mouse will always be copyrighted.)  A more specific answer can be found in the FAQ section of the U.S. Copyright Office website.

The minute you write that last sentence and put down your pen, your work has gained certain rights under the copyright laws.  This is why you don’t need to tell agents or editors that your work is copyrighted because they already know that.  Caveat: while ownership of the copyright is automatic, you may not be able to collect all the damages if you don’t register it.

You can register with the U.S. Copyright Office.  Registering preserves some rights that you might not otherwise get, such as the right to sue for statutory damages (a fixed amount per work) and attorney’s fees.

Sorry, but that’s not how it works.   First of all, there isn’t really a copyright police (yes the FBI deals with copyright matters, but usually in the case of large scale criminal infringement) and the copyright office doesn’t enforce copyrights.  You’re probably wondering what the point of copyright is if it isn’t enforced.  What copyright means is if someone copies your work, you can take them to court and sue for damages or get an injunction.  (An injunction means that the offending party must stop doing what they are doing.)

Take-home Message:  Copyright is a property right to your work which you own automatically.  By registering it, you give yourself evidence of having created that work.  If someone copies your work, you can sue for damages or get them to stop their infringement.

As many of you already know, I’m married to a wonderful man who–for the purposes of this blog–is called lawyer hubby.  In fact, he’s an IP (intellectual property) litigator, which means he understands all that legal rigmarole that writers often fret about and he has actually represented authors in court.

Of course, I get to reap the benefits of his wisdom, but it hardly seems fair that I should be the only one.  Hence my new blog series for Tuesdays: Legally Speaking.  Starting this afternoon and going for the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a series of posts on the different aspects of copyright and legal stuff that writers should know about.  Lawyer hubby gave me a crash course and I’ve done my best to translate it from legal-speak to normal-people-speak.

That said, here’s iggi with his little Disclaimer poster.  I’m not a lawyer.  These posts should in no way be considered legal advice.  The point of these posts is to give my writer friends (that’s you!) some of the basic information so when you do seek legal advice from a lawyer, you can ask smart questions.