The Aftermath of Writing Conferences

Whew...I just got back from the LDSstorymakers conference. My head is swimming with new information, my ego experienced a little tweaking and I'm trying to figure out where to begin! Conferences are a wonderful, good/bad thing. You have access to lots of new facts from established, successful writers, but somewhere around the seventh break-out session you start to have doubts about why you're even there! Can you even write? That's why it's always important to have a little "detox" session when you come home. Don't start making any drastic edits to your manuscript, don't tell yourself you're not really a writer. Just sit and let it all sink in and then decide what, of everything you learned, is going to be of value to you. You don't have to do it all and you don't have to be like anyone else. What works for one writer won't necessarily work for you. Focus on a few of the technical things that you might need to change (punctuation, grammar) and then zero in on one aspect of your writing you'd like to improve (characterization, pacing, plot). If you've gotten good feedback on your writing before now, and especially if you've had a work accepted, you may not be as "broken" as you thought you were--so don't struggle to "fix" everything.