Gone Fishin'

It's that time again, and all of us here at What Women Write are excited and thrilled to be packing our bags and wine bottles and yoga mats for our annual retreat. Once again we will explore a new-to-us house; we will eat and drink and read and write and talk and laugh and probably cry a little. There will be coffee and snacks, quiet talks, boisterous laughter, late night murmurs, and shared stories on walks.

Our first retreat 

In the coming weeks, there will likely be a renewed energy that may well manifest itself in our posts and hopefully in our work. Definitely a renewal of our bond as friends and writers and confidantes, and a real sense of camaraderie born of watching each other work on our laptops in our PJs.

Seeing The Help together

Maybe more than anything else we do together--the author events, movies, hours-long lunches--this is what has come to define us as a group. We have all convened with other writers at conferences, retreats, seminars, workshops and groups, but this weekend we've taken now for six years (is it really six years!?) holds a special place for each of us, each in our own way, and in many shared ways as well.

As writers, we wish for all of you, writers or readers or thinkers or doers or wishers or waiters, this same kind of kindred experience. And now, if you'll excuse us all, we've got some packing to do. Talk to ya on the flip.

Last year's retreat

Contentedly Iced-In

By Kim

The freezing rain started shortly after the last of the What Women Write crew arrived at our retreat house in Granbury, Texas. It lasted through the night, covering houses, roads, and countryside with a layer of ice.

We do get ice storms around here every once in a while and when it happens the world pretty much stops.

Our cities have no supplies of sand or salt to put on the highways. Basics like eggs, milk, and bottled water disappear from grocery store shelves. Schools and offices close. News reporters beg everyone to stay home and wait for temperatures to rise. Those who don't heed the warning may be trapped on expressways for hours.

Everyone gets cabin fever except for us, apparently.

Though we were a short walk from one of the Texas’ quaintest down towns, no one lamented being unable to tour it. When husbands and children texted their concerns about us braving the roads to come home on Sunday, we called the landlady and she granted us an extra day. We took that time without guilt, scurried back off to whatever corners we had claimed for ourselves, and most of us had a productive day.

We never lost power and we had plenty of food. A temperamental coffee pot was our biggest inconvenience, and even that was swiftly overcome by Pioneer Susan who rigged up a French press and made coffee the old-fashioned way.

The best part of being iced-in, though, was that when emotions ran high, and they did for most of us at some point, the group became closer in ways that may not have happened had we had the option of escaping each other.

Those who needed consoling or encouragement got it. Those who needed a dose of tough love got that, too. I went into this retreat so discouraged and overwhelmed, I was dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. I didn't realize how close until I heard the things I needed to hear to stop the wheels spinning in my mind. Now home, I’m not only calmer than I have been in years, but I also know without a doubt that I have five women who accept my quirks and have my back.

I've never had that before and it’s one heck of a gift.

What about you, readers? Have you ever found yourself closer to a group when you are trapped together by circumstance? Or, has it soured relationships for you? 

Hooking ... not as easy as you'd think

By Pamela

Before I could tie my own shoes, I could bait a hook. Before I learned to drive a car, I learned to row a boat. Long before I became adept in the kitchen, I filleted fish on a pier. Such was the life of a kid who spent summers at the lake.

Me with my brother and sister:
learning the art of hooking at an early age.

But hooking fish and hooking readers are two different skills. Fish are pretty easy. A fat juicy worm, a shiny lure. Readers? They tend to be a little more particular.

At our recent retreat, my goal was to improve my hook. But before I could fully embrace the challenge, I had to know more about what the heck I was doing.

Author Nathan Bransford says a book's hook is "the quest and the central conflict, described as succinctly as possible, designed to make someone want to read more." Every novel, he says, is a quest--a journey that takes the reader from the beginning of the story to the end. The conflict is what your character must overcome to get from points A to B. Put them both together and you have it. A hook!

In Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, he devoted an entire chapter to hooks. (Chapter 14, if you're reading along.) Literary agent Donald Maass talks about hook in Writing the Breakout Novel. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find any credible book on writing that didn't address The Hook.

But the term 'hook' is thrown about pretty generously. Hooks open chapters, end chapters, begin paragraphs and generally appear throughout a novel. They're what keep us reading when we're really too tired to do so. We just can't put the book down, darn hooks!

What concerned me about my manuscript was not the hooks that appear throughout my story. It was THE HOOK. That one element that makes my book The One someone will want to read. It's what pulls readers in even before they decide to purchase the book. It's the bait that gets them committed to spending hours of their precious time immersed in the story.

A hook is sometimes apparent in a title. For example, Nathan says Snakes on a Plane reveals the movie's hook. Quest? Get the snakes off the plane. Conflict? Ahem, snakes + plane. Conflict, natch. In Moneyball, the hook is: Baseball manager on a budget takes an unprecedented approach to building a winning team. Showtime's Dexter has a unique hook: A Miami police forensics expert moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. Dexter's quest? Catch and kill criminals. Conflict: keeping those close to him from finding out what he does after hours.

For me, my hook was present in the story; it just didn't become known until chapter four. Maybe even five. So making my story's hook stronger simply meant moving chapters around (and tweaking the details) so that the hook now appears in chapter two--the beginning of chapter two. And who knows? Before I'm done, it might become chapter one.

For now the challenge continues: keeping the reader involved in the story so that he or she stays with it. The only way to do that is to raise the conflict, keeping the line taut. And as a result, land my fish once he's caught--all the way to the end.