After waking up at 5:00 a.m. five days in a row for work, I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag myself out of bed on Saturday to attend the  Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference. I’m so glad  I did. Why? Mary Buckham, Margie Lawson, and Chuck Sambuchino that’s why. If you’re a writer and you don’t know who these three gurus are, you might have your head up certain dark orifices. (I’m just saying…)

Mary Buckham gave a great workshop on “Writing Active Settings”. Her book, by the same name, is next on my to-buy list when I make it to the bookstore. I need a paper copy because I’m going to highlight the hell out of it.

Margie Lawson gave three brilliant workshops: “Writing Body Language and Dialogue”, “Top 25 Rhetorical Devices for Fiction Writers”, and “Deep Editing to Make your Openings Pop”. I plan to order her workshop packets online, and if I ever have the funds, I’m going to sign up for one of the writing retreats she hosts at her home in Colorado.

Chuck Sambuchino gave a speech at breakfast about honing your pitch, and his workshop, “Everything You Need to Know About Agents” gave some great information, but it was his rousing keynote speech, “How to Get Published” at the end of the night that really hit home. He started off with all the things that are not within your control, and it was a ginormous list. Then he listed the ten things you can do:

1.Write the best book you can. Edit it. Edit it again. Give it to Beta readers, and then edit it again before submitting.

2. There is no one right way to be published, but the most successful authors seem to be hybrid pubbed.

3. Build a platform=be visible online. (His book, Create Your Writer Platform, is on my to-buy list.)

4. Keep moving forward. Keep writing.

5. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Agents might want the book you’re selling, but the next thing they want to know is what else have you written? You can’t be a one-book author. There’s no career in that.

6. Write for love and for money. You have to pay the bills and follow your heart. Do both.

7. Don’t believe every rule you hear. There is no exact word count for a query or a synopsis, but there are guidelines. There are word counts for genres. Pay attention to those unless your first name is Nora or your last name is Rowling.

8. Watch out for Chapter 1 traps: starting too slow, or the dreaded info dump.

9. Steal from yourself. If an ms is sitting in a drawer, can you pull a few chapters and turn them into a short story? Can you rewrite a magazine article for different interest groups? Reuse and recycle what you’ve done.

10. Stop binge-watching Netflix and make more time for writing.

So there you have it. All the wisdom I gleaned from the conference, or at least the writing wisdom. The other super-important discovery I made is that it’s best to order a burger from the hotel restaurant and eat before the official dinner banquet because caterers do some bizarre things to chicken. If it really was chicken…

What words of wisdom do you have to share from conferences? What’s your favorite conference?