Insights from the 2025 In Your Write Mind Conference
I can tell that a writing conference was worth the attendance when I leave feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the new info stuffed into my brain. Which was how I felt leaving the most recent In Your Write Mind workshop last weekend, enough so I needed a bit of time to let my mind settle before going back over my notes to pick out the gems.
This is probably going to be a slightly more random-feeling blog post than my usual because the topics covered at IYWM were pretty varied, and the notes I took on them were filtered through the lens of “shit I find neat and/or useful”. But I also figured I probably wouldn't be the only one to find said shit neat and/or useful, and putting them together into a blog post seemed like a useful way to trick myself into actually going through my notes before they just got shoved into a folder and forgotten about—so here we are. Read on for some random but hopefully beneficial advice. I also did a similar post for last year’s conference if you’re looking for more random writerly advice.
On writing mysteries
I've been toying with the idea of writing a mystery set on Kirri (the primary planet in my main sci-fi sandbox) ever since working with D.P. Brown on a police procedural style mystery set in his Theme of Thieves universe, so it felt like kismet to see Michael Dell's workshop on Writing a Mystery on the conference schedule. It proved to be a very fun and interactive session, where all the attendees came together to establish the bones of a potential mystery story.
Granted, I'm hardly an expert on writing mysteries still, but I did get some very helpful takeaways from this session that I plan to apply when I try my hand at this new genre:
Plot is king. Every scene in a mystery needs to move toward its solution, and it's imperative that the plot follows internal logic with no holes. This is smart advice for writing in just about every genre, honestly, but especially important in a mystery, where part of the joy of reading it is trying to solve the puzzle. A reader can't do that if the story doesn't make sense.
The author needs to play fair. Speaking of solving the mystery, the reader can't do that if they're not given all of the information. This means introducing suspects early and providing the reader with the clues they need to solve the puzzle on their own, even if those clues are presented in such a way that hides their importance initially, or exactly how the pieces fit together only becomes obvious at the end.
Five suspects is the ideal amount. Too few suspects, and the mystery is too easy to solve. Too many, and it's confusing. For a book-length work, Michael suggests having five people who are set up to potentially be the murderer.
Give every suspect a secret. You want every suspect to have something that makes them look guilty, even if they're not. To accomplish this, Michael suggests giving all of them both a strong motive for killing the victim and a secret. If they have something to hide, this gives them a reason to act suspicious and warrant investigation from your protagonist, even if their secret ends up being completely unrelated to the mystery in question.
Set up the clues so that they could point to any suspect. Again, this just helps to build the puzzle and make it a bit trickier to solve. At the least, each clue should potentially point to multiple suspects, at least up until the big final one that ultimately leads your protagonist to correctly identify the perpetrator.
On promotion and author platforms
These are insights that actually came from two separate workshops: Lori Pollard-Johnson's session “Promotion for Writers who Hate Promotion” (which is I'm pretty sure all of us) and Ed Downes' session “Build it and They Will Come: Launching an Author Platform that Attracts Readers”. The big-picture message from both of these sessions was similar: if you want people to read your writing, you need to somehow let them know it exists.
Toward that end, here's some of the advice I jotted down:
- Vary your methods of promotion to capture more audience segments. Lori suggested started by making a list of things you'd be willing to do in order to promote your book, then going through that list and labeling them 1-5, based on this metric:
1. Things you can do right now
2. Things you can do this month
3. Things you can do this quarter
4. Things you can do in the next 6 months
5. Things you can do in the next year
…this can help you to bring some order and control to the vast world that is potential methods of promotion.
- Consider being a guest on other people's platforms. Content creators always need stuff they can share with their audience, and by providing that stuff, you also get the chance to potentially make their audience into your audience, too. One type of content I've never considered is looking for opportunities to be a guest on a podcast. You can find lists of podcasts seeking guests on the appropriately named website PodcastGuests.com, if that's a route you want to take. If you're more of a “words only” kind of writer, guest blogging is an option. Look for people who write blogs in your niche, and don't only focus on writing. You can also think about the location and content of your books and seek out blogs in those areas, for instance writing a guest blog for a cryptid site if your book features Bigfoot, or writing a post for a blog focused on Appalachian culture if your book is set in West Virginia.
- Start building an email mailing list ASAP, even if you don't have a newsletter to send them yet. As Ed said, “The best time to collect email addresses is when you don't need them yet.” This is advice I plan to take in the very near future. I already have a website and blog, but there's not really a place on either for people to sign up for a mailing list. With Scribble House, since we do have a monthly newsletter, I've been proactive in seeking out sign-ups—and it's started to yield dividends. The more people on your list, the more potential readers you can reach the next time you get something published.
- Make sure your content is valuable, interesting, and only 10% has commercial intent. By “commercial intent”, Ed means social posts or email blasts that directly ask folks to buy things. That's the kind of stuff that makes people feel sold to, so you want to separate that kind of content with stuff that's more just interesting or useful. Think things like writing prompts, reading lists, behind-the-scenes looks into your process, or craft how-tos.
On time management
Maria V. Snyder did a couple of helpful talks and panels at this conference, including a reprise of the talk I went to last year on self-publishing. The one that I took the most notes during, though, was her time management talk, maybe just because it's the advice I feel like I'm in most need of right now.
Some highlights:
- Post-Its are a useful way to visualize what you need to do. Maria actually color-codes her Post-Its based on what the task is and its urgency, which can add another level to the quick visual organization. This strikes me as potentially a good creative adaptation of the Kanban board that's popular in corporate settings, or at least aims for the same basic goal. By making it easy to see your current tasks and their deadlines at a glance, you cut down on the number of decisions you need to make before you start working, letting you spend more of your mental energy on the tasks themselves.
- Use an Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks. This is another one that's ported over from corporate world, I think, or at least I've also seen it applied in an entrepreneurial context. The Eisenhower Matrix is a 4-quadrant graph, like so:
This gives you four buckets to put tasks into, and how you approach the task will vary depending on which bucket it's in:
1. Urgent and important: do it first
2. Urgent and not important: Find a person, company, tool, etc. that can do it for you
3. Not urgent and important: Schedule it as soon as is feasible
4. Not urgent and not important: Delay or delete it
- Know your prime brain times and use them for the most important things. As Maria said, “Never give prime time to mindless chores.” Everyone's brain works on its own rhythms and schedule. If you're at your best in the early morning, try to reserve that time for your writing and other high-importance things that need your full attention. On the other hand, if you're more creative at night, then those are the hours you should hoard and safeguard for getting words on the page. Working with your brain's natural rhythms will help you to feel more productive because you'll be better equipped to get more done with your time.
- Don't let your task organization system become another source of stress. Something else Maria made a point of (that I at least needed to hear) is that, for task-oriented people, the to-do list will never be empty—and that's okay. The goal isn't to wipe the slate every day, but to make sure the tasks you're passing forward to future you aren't the important ones that need to be done right away. And if you do miss an important task, don't beat yourself up over it. That guilt is only going to waste more time and energy.
On the objective correlative
If you have no clue what an “objective correlative” is, don't feel bad—I didn't either until I went to this session by writer Iris Matthews. But it's actually something that's quite common in fiction once you know to look out for it.
In brief, objective correlative is the repeated use of an object to evoke a feeling in the reader. This could be an actual physical object in the story's world or something more intangible, like a color, the weather, or the tone of the writing. The point is, it's something that the writer establishes that reinforces the character's emotions while eliciting them in the reader. What differentiates it from similar concepts like themes or symbolism is that, in the case of the objective correlative, that meaning is assigned by the viewpoint character, and may be very personal to their situation or worldview rather than a broadly accepted meaning like “roses equal love” or “rain equals sad”.
Another way Iris explained the concept is that it's like the application of the meme “Tell me you're X without telling me you're X”—it's using a trait or detail as a stand-in for a broader concept, allowing you to establish a kind of emotional shorthand that threads throughout a work.
A couple other tips on using objective correlative:
- It needs a payoff to function effectively, otherwise it's basically just symbolism. By payoff, this means that it aligns somehow with the character's emotional growth or journey.
- It works best when the object is used as a background element woven into descriptions or passing comments, rather than a focal point or an item that's integral to the plot.
- It's going to stand out to the reader because of how often you mention the object, to the point that it may feel like you're overdoing it. Because of that, you want to make sure you're applying it strategically, in the specific moments where reinforcing that emotion makes the most sense or will have the biggest impact for the reader.
- It's most commonly used in the genres of romance and horror, in large part because these are the two genres whose main defining trait is aiming to elicit a big emotional response from the reader. This isn't to say you can't use it in literary realism or sci-fi, but those are the genres where you're most likely to find it in the wild, if you're looking for some examples of the concept in action.
On crafting resonant work from raw emotion
One of the last workshops I went to during the conference was led by Pittsburgh poet and friend of Scribble House Kendall Snee. The topic was billed as poetry-focused, but I suspected it would have just as much value to offer a prose writer—and I was correct!
The workshop went through a series of exercises that were very helpful in clarifying how to convey emotions on the page without explicitly spelling them out. Some of the ways we did that:
Personify an emotion. This started by picking an emotion. Then, we went through and decided things like: What would that emotion wear? Who are their friends? What are their hobbies? How do they hold a pencil? What songs do they listen to on their commute to work (if any—maybe they prefer talk radio or silence)? If you took a candid photo of the emotion, what would they look like?
Shift the emotion into an image. Pick an emotion and describe it in a physical way using simile or metaphor. Alternatively, you could describe actions a person might do when feeling that emotion, or what they'd look like when experiencing it. The idea is to create a bank of imagery that can be employed to evoke that emotion rather than stating it outright (e.g. the old show don't tell chestnut).
Find the emotion's foil. For this, we used a handy emotion wheel (like this one), and started by picking an emotion then going across the circle to find its opposite. This proved an interesting exercise in itself, because the things that were positioned across the circle from each other weren't always obvious pairings like happy vs. sad. Once you have a pair that appeals to you, write the same poem (or scene, for us fiction writers) in both of these opposing tones.
Another big point that Kendall made: not everyone experiences or visualizes emotions in the same way. If your perception of happiness is drastically different than someone else's, that's not a problem—it just means you get to present a unique perspective on that to your reader. On the flip side of that: not all of your characters are going to feel emotions the same way, either, so varying the way they express them could be another way to craft a unique voice for each character.
...there were other neat things I learned during the conference, like how real forensic investigators process a crimescene, some tips on building a worldbuilding bible, and advice on independent publishing. I might do a follow-up in the future that highlights some of that learning, but for now this seems like plenty of new information to process. Which might be my new criteria for whether I felt like a conference was worth the invested time: if I come home with more new info than I can reasonably shove into a single blog post, I'd say it was mission accomplished.
My big final takeaway: I've left the IYWM workshop with lots of great info and connections two years in a row, now, and I'm already excited to do it again next year.
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