My Day at OWFI 2023

Kim Ventrella on Middle Grade Fiction

Kim Ventrella enthusiastically presented the key features of middle grade fiction.  

• The audience of middle grade fiction is 8-14 year-olds; roughly grades 3-6, sometimes 8 (long tail).  
• A typical protagonist of middle grade fiction is about 12 years old.  
• A “short” middle grade fiction novel is ~ 20,000 words.
• A “typical” middle grade fiction novel is 40,000 – 60,000 words.  
• Middle grade books are *not* chapter books, which are typically geared at grades 1-3, and are written with overly simple language to build confidence in reading.  
• There are three things you cannot do in middle grade fiction: 
  • Curse
  • Sex
  • End without hope
• Middle grade fiction sub-genres:
  • Realistic fiction
  • Fantasy and Science Fiction
  • Mystery
  • Historical
  • Spooky
• There is much more tolerance for blending sub-genres in middle grade fiction than in adult or YA.  

Casie Dodd on Chapbooks

I walked into Casie Dodd’s session on Chapbooks a little late, so I did not experience its full glory.  The session reminded me that you don’t need an 80,000 word tome to get started as an author.  Chapbooks could be a good fit for short pieces of poetry and prose.  I loved the example chapbooks that Casie shared with us.  This session reminded me of the little mini-books I used to create for myself in grammar school by collecting 4-8 sheets of standard printer paper, folding them in half, and stapling them together at the fold.  

Casie shared with us some chapbook publishers:

• Ethel
• Bull City Press
• Thirty West
• Texas Review Press (has an annual contest)
• Belle Point Press

Marisa Mohi on Blogging and SEO

This session inspired me to blog about this session.  

Marisa taught us about domain authority.  moz.com is a domain authority checker.  It tells how much ‘authority’ your website or blog have, on a scale of 1-100.  The higher your domain authority, the more likely your site will rank on the first page of a Google search, and/or be featured in a snippet.  

When blogging, it helps to know what Google wants in a post.  

• Answer questions that are useful to a reader.  
• Length >= 1000 words.  Longer is better.  
• Good use of keywords.  

Marisa provided Blogging Best Practices:  

• Structure should be accessible.
  • Use H2 and H3 headings
  • Short paragraphs
  • Casual tone
  • Consistent style guide
• Length >= 1000 words. Cornerstone content should be >=2,500 words.  
• Links
  • Link back to old posts.
  • Use keywords in anchor content.
• Consistency
  • Try to blog at least once a week.  If you can do more, do more.  Once a month is fine, too.  We are human, after all.  

Rob Roensch on Writing Flash Mémoires

Rob Roensch led a stellar workshop on writing Flash Memoires.  He struck the right balance of simplicity and complexity; of direction and openness; of listening and working.  This was truly a model workshop.  I cannot do justice to the experience.  Rob defined for us a “photo moment”, which is a moment in our past experience that stands out, even if we do not know why.  We wrote our own pieces during the session and some participants shared.  We learned that there is unspoken magic involved in the discriminate juxtaposition of two pieces of flash memoires.  

One classmate/participant was an older woman whose first photo moment was of her toddler throwing his shoes down the stairs.  She kept having to pick them up.  She wondered when he would ever leave the house and go to college.  Her second photo moment was of herself finding those shoes many years later, and then wondering when he would come home from college to visit.  

Brevity Magazine puts out two publications of flash memoires per year: In Short, and In Brief.  

Rob Roensch teaches at Oklahoma City University.  His students are truly blessed to have him as an instructor.

Humor with Claire Taylor

Claire discussed the anatomy of humor based on the book, Ha!, which breaks down humor into three parts.  

1. Constructing an expectation
2. Reckoning, creating a deviation from the expectation
3. Resolving the dissonance with a laugh

You can create humor by taking plot points of high stakes, creating an expectation, and then subverting the expectation.  Plot points with greatest tension can be the ripest points for injecting humor.  

Claire also shared with us the secret to writing a new super awesome bestseller. Acronym intended.  

• Supernatural
• Humor
• Action
• Romance
• Tragedy

Conclusion

I am unable to do justice to the wonderful speakers and their talks at OWFI.  It was a wonderful conference, full of energy, and definitely well worth attending. Many thanks to all the volunteers who made it happen.