The Festival took place at a few different venues in Sioux Falls, but the one we attended was at the Holiday Inn hotel downtown. The events we were attending started at 10 in the morning, and Katie and I both went to the Writing for Children speaker, while the others went to the talk about writing screenplays.
The author who spoke to Katie and I was named Jean Patrick, and she was the author of several children's books, both fiction and non-fiction. She told us the story of how she was first noticed by an editor, and how she plead for a chance to write a book which then became her first children's book: The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth.
Mrs. Patrick also had us do a couple of exercises to show us how different word sounds can affect a paragraph. We went through magazines and circled words that had hard O sounds, hard U sounds, and K sounds. There were also a few reading exercises, where she read excerpts from children's books out loud and then asked us things that we noticed about the passages.
She then told us the steps to writing a story, which I thought was very helpful. As she went down the list, she explained each point to us in detail, including one which I thought was kind of strange at first: Be mean. She told us that we had to be mean to our characters, because the more they struggle and the harder things are for them, the more satisfying of a read it is and the more hooked our readers get.
After we listened to Mrs. Patrick speak, we went to lunch. Ashley, Katie, Jesse, and I went to a Diner that was a few blocks away from the Festival, and afterwards we did a little bit of shopping while Jared and Paige, along with Dr. Nelson, went to a luncheon that we were not fortunate enough to get tickets to.
The last half of our day at the Festival was very eventful. We found a big room where all of the authors at the Festival had tables set up for their books, so we could walk around and talk to them and possibly buy any books that interested us. We happened to stumble across an author who had graduated from Dakota State and was a previous student of Dr. Nelson's. Her works were fantasy novels, and two of them were interpretations of stories I am sure we're all familiar with: Rapunzel, and the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Dr. Nelson got a picture taken with the author, Sarah Pepper, and we wandered around a bit more.
After we thought we had seen all that there was to see, Katie, Ashley, and I sat out in the hall to wait for everyone else to be done. While we were in the hallway, Paige joined us, and soon after a woman named Sandra Brannan approached us. She asked us all what we wanted to do after we graduated and she was very enthusiastic about our career goals. She then asked us for help with a project she was working on, and afterwards she was so grateful that she bought all of us copies of one of her books, along with another author's book's. We took pictures with both her and the other author, Chris Browne (the man who writes the Hagar the Horrible comics), and they both signed their books for us.
Even though I missed out on three classes that day, I think going to the Festival was worth it. I got some very good writing advice and was able to see firsthand how many authors really do come out of South Dakota. I would definitely go next year, if the Festival wasn't behind held in Rapid City.
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