By Lorene Masters

After my first writer’s conference two years ago, I learned that the world of writing is full of intelligent, cutting-edge agents and publishers who are not afraid to tell you how they really feel. And how I sincerely wished that they would not be so bold when it came to me and the critiquing of my proposal letters and manuscripts. Their critique was all over the board from, “you are a gifted writer with a great story that needs to be told,” to “you need to start all over and write this as fiction,” and “who told you that you could write memoirs because you clearly cannot and you must not have read very many of them or you would know how to write one.”