Writer's Weekend, Day 2--Friday 6/10/05

[annathepiper]

Friday was a busy day for seimaisin and me at Writer's Weekend. We wound up going to all the panels we hit together all throughout the conference--partly just for the amusement value of hanging out, and partly for the usefulness of sharing insights with one another on the panel material. We both found that being able to discuss them with someone was almost as valuable as the panels themselves!


One amusing thing about Writer's Weekend is that it's friendly to all sorts of genres--including erotica. Or in the case of Ellora's Cave, 'romantica'--romance novels which are all hot and spicy with the sex, much more than traditional romance novels. Ellora's Cave is a publisher that's enjoyed great success with these sorts of novels, starting off as one woman with a PC in her bedroom who got tired of having her manuscripts rejected by the usual romance publishers and decided to found a company of her own. It seems that EC has been successful enough, too, that they're starting up a mainstream imprint to go with their erotica one, Cerridwen Press. This panel was about the new imprint.

What really made it interesting to me as a tech geek, though, was that EC has been focusing specifically on publishing eBooks. It's a niche market still, but one that has fueled their success and allowed them to do things like expanding into larger offices, start a new imprint, and start releasing printed copies of their line of books. The lady running the panel, Raelene Gorlinsky, didn't go into the details of eBooks as much as I might have liked--which was fine, since the panel was mostly about explaining the new imprint and what their guidelines were going to be for it. They're apparently taking all genres for Cerridwen Press, up to and including SF and fantasy, and also--very notably--gay and lesbian fiction.

(Quite a few people remarked during the conference at various points that they wished there were more queer romance novels. alg from Tor, while herself cheerfully supportive of the idea of gay and lesbian romances, also had to admit that they just wouldn't sell to most readers. So it's still a tricky niche market. It was fun to see the intersection of folks who said they'd read queer romances, and folks who showed up for the Fanfic/Slash readings, though. ;) )

Anyway, Ms. Gorlinsky handed out info packets about both of EC's imprints. I don't necessarily see myself sending them anything at any point, but it's nice to know about Cerridwen Press to keep them in the back of my mind as a potential SF/F publisher.



The agent talk given by Susannah Taylor of the Richard Henshaw Group was generally familiar to me from things I'd heard from agents at last year's conference. But it was good to hear them again. These points included:

• Like editors at publishing houses, agents gets lots and lots and lots of manuscript submissions. It is just not possible for them to answer every single query or submission with a personal reply. They do not have time, not when they spend a great deal of their days working with their current clients.
  
• If you send a query or submission to an agent, it's okay to nudge him or her if you haven't gotten a reply in a while. But try to do it patiently, and don't try to nudge too often. Agents are human and therefore fallible, and sometimes something will fall through the cracks. But on the other hand, you also don't want to make the agent defensive or feel guilty about not having looked at your submission yet by nudging him or her too often.
  
• Susannah said that she will look at writers endorsed by her current clients. This does not necessarily apply to all agents, though. And it's important to remember that 'endorsed by current clients' specifically means that that client has mentioned you to the agent. Telling the agent yourself that 'your client So-and-so loves my work' is not kosher. Especially if you haven't actually asked So-and-so's permission first.
  
• Susannah's preferences for work she looks at are crime fiction and women's fiction, but she'll look at several genres. She tends to be very mainstream in her tastes and not so much 'literary'. But what's important with her is the story.
  
• Susannah is a member of the AAR, the Association of Author's Representatives. This gets mentioned every single time I hear an agent give a panel, both at Writer's Weekend and at writing panels at SF cons. While you don't have to be a member of the AAR to be an ethical agent, membership with this organization is a big flag that you can be reasonably sure that you're dealing with someone who won't swindle you. AAR's membership guidelines require an agent to adhere to a set of ethical practices, including not charging reading fees. Remember: money always flows TO the writer.
  
• If you're worried about making sure your agent is based in New York, don't be. That's not vitally important.
  
• When you're picking out an agent, first go with your business sense and then go with your personal sense of the person in question. Your priority should be to get a business advocate, not a buddy. (It's extra bonus points if you become good friends with your agent, sure, but the agent's function is to be there to work for you, not to be your pal.)
  
• As with publishers, be sure to check an agency's guidelines on what they accept for submissions. It makes you look unprofessional if, for example, you try to submit an SF/F work to someone who doesn't handle that genre. The thing to remember with agents here is that a big part of an agent's function is to know the proper people to whom to submit your book. If he or she is not versed with handling your genre, they will be less informed on the proper target markets for your work.
  
• A general note on synopses: your synopsis needs to reflect that you know the structure of your book, which in turn affects its pacing and flow.
  
• Remember that a rejection letter doesn't necessarily mean your book is bad--it might be indicative of an agent's lack of time to handle it, or other works reviewed or even currently handled by that agent being too similar to yours.
  
• Don't try to write to what's 'hot' or 'marketable'. Write what you love. That's the only way to differentiate yourself and tell your story, not anyone else's. If you're writing what you love, you will have a better chance at making someone else love your story too.
  
• What work Susannah might do for a client depends on that client--e.g., editing, career planning, etc.
  
• The Richard Henshaw Group does take SF/F (good to know for ME!), and both Susannah and her colleague Richard will take SF/F submissions. Richard tends to prefer darker-flavored stuff and Susannah lighter-flavored stuff, though they will swap submissions if need be.
  
• Pen names across genres and publishing houses will depend on a given author's career and scheduling and such. Keeping the same name on your work might work for you if you're branching out into a new genre that's still similar to your current one.

Evan Fogelman of the Evan Fogelman Literary Agency was a specific point of interest for me at this year's conference, since I showed up intending to pitch Faerie Blood to him! He'd impressed me last year with his very straightforward, no-nonsense, and yet quite amiable demeanor, which is why I wanted to pitch to him this year. Well, that and he also takes SF/F. I was pleased to see that my impression of him did not change this time around.

As with Susannah Taylor, much of what he had to say during his talk was familiar from last year's conference, but that wasn't a bad thing!

• Finding the right agent and the right publisher can definitely improve your chances of getting into print, but it's important to remember that even if you do have an agent, this is not a guarantee that you will sell something. Unagented manuscripts do go unsold sometimes.
  
• There is a lot of subjectivity involved in an agent's reaction to submissions. Which makes sense if you think about it from the standpoint of wanting to attract someone who will be specifically interested in your work rather than someone else's--it's like wanting to get a reader to buy your book. You have to interest that agent, and when you get right down to it, what will work to get that agent's interest will often be a very subjective thing.
  
• Be persistent. You have to be in the writing industry. If you give up after 26 submissions, you will never, EVER know if the 27th one might have been the one to get you a contract.
  
• COMPLETE THE BOOK. Some folks both at last year's WW and this year's allowed some fudge room here; if you're sufficiently on top of your work to have an excellent idea of where you're going with it, and you're consistently working on it and aiming towards a known target date for completion, it's still possible to pitch a book. But if you're brand new out of the gate, it'll look a lot better if you can point at a finished work to prove you are in fact capable of finishing a novel.
  
• You should read the types of books you want to write.
  
• Like Susannah, Evan heavily stressed the importance of looking at whether an agent is a member of the AAR.
  
• Don't try to compare yourself to a writer who's got years of experience. It won't really work, and it's also unfair to you since it's not really a proper comparison anyway. Of course a seasoned writer's books are going to come across way better than yours. What you should do instead is to compare your work to that writer's very earliest works, as applicable.
  
• When you're shopping around for an agent, look at their editorial contacts, how they operate their business, what sort of career planning they offer to their clients.
  
• A tip on when to do submissions: between February and May, and between August and October, are peak submission times according to Mr. Fogelman. If you're submitting to an agent first rather than directly to a publisher, you'll want to tweak your own send-out dates to account for letting the agent hit those peak times.
  
• Be prepared to WAIT.
  
• His ideal client is someone who practices 'informed patience', and has that critical link between what he or she reads and writes.

Ron Malfi, Susan Sizemore, and the redoubtable Jim Butcher (YAY JIM!) gave a talk on one of the biggest tenets hammered into the brains of all fledgling writers: "Show, Don't Tell". Their way of giving this panel was to offer up tidbits of what this meant to them, and asking folks in the room for the same sorts of input.

Some ways to do this:

• Let the reader infer data from little throwaway bits in dialogue or narrative
  
• Don't have characters telling each other what they should already know, or about something that the reader has already seen
  
• Having the character take an action makes a much stronger impression than having them just say something, or just describing them in a given way

Other points of interest:

• A writer never stops learning how to show and not tell. You always need to be on the lookout for it.
  
• It's okay to tell the reader something that would be boring to show them, or which might be too outright bad or disgusting to actually show.
  
• Don't get too bogged down in research--and remember that you don't have to show the reader every single little detail of research you do. It's important that you do it, because it WILL resonate out into your work and make it more solid, but don't fall into the trap of "I spent SIXTEEN HOURS RESEARCHING THIS, by god, and I'm going to show you every single thing I learned!"
  
• Think about description and exposition as sort of a word-based equivalent of mood music. One vivid example of this that stood out for me during the panel was a scenario where a sad character is demonstrated to be sad to the reader not by describing the character's mood directly--but rather by describing the fence he was passing.

Eve Gordon and Wolfgang Baur had one of the panels with the coolest titles in the whole conference: "There is No Story Fairy". That's a really vital thing for any writer hopeful to learn, I think. This panel was all about writing myths--and debunking them.

First and foremost: writing is WORK. The Story Fairy is not going to come along, hit you with a wand (*TWANG*), and let you suddenly find yourself with a finished novel in front of you. You have to put out the work to make it happen. And the best way to do this is to sit down and write. Every single day.

Critique does not mean you suck as a writer. You need to learn to accept critique gracefully, to listen to it, and to know when to take critique and when not to. People who critique your story are not always going to be right, and you need to be in enough touch with your own story--and to trust your own instincts--enough to know when you need to stand by a given part of your book and why you need to do it. And this even applies to professional editors as well; I've heard a few different writers now speak of the need to be prepared when to gracefully accept a revision from an editor and when to debate it with them.

Learn to accept your own work--and your responsibility to improve it. Telling yourself "oh, I suck" and then waiting for someone to come along and fix your book's problems for you is not going to work.

"The character took over the novel" is a sign that you have lost control of the story and you don't know enough about what it's doing. (This is a point which which I agree only to some extent, by the way. As I have mentioned a couple of times lately on my journal, I still have no idea what's going to happen in the latter half of Lament of the Dove... and even when I sit down and plan out several more chapters' worth of outline to get a better idea of what's to come, most of the time with this book I'm finding that what I actually write is NOT what's on the outline. This may well be caused by my long experience on MUSHes, though, where a long and complicated storyline grew organically out of interactive roleplay with only the most general, sketchy idea of where the overall plot might go. As I'm working on Lament, I'm often feeling like the characters are roleplaying out the story in my head. So as with many things in writing, I'm thinking that this is one of those things that you have to figure out for yourself whether it's true for you.)

"No one in my workshop understands me" is a recurring writer myth, and it goes back to learning to gracefully accept critique. Especially if you're consistently getting the same feedback from several different people. If that's happening, you really ought to consider giving that feedback greater weight.

"If I show my work to someone else, it will sully my vision!" I have yet to actually meet anyone who indulges in this writer myth, perhaps because all the writers I know realize that that sort of attitude goes completely against the point of writing something in the first place: i.e., to show it to others. And when you're in the process of creating a novel, feedback is meant to help you clarify your vision, not to damage it. Even the best writer in the world is going to screw up something in his or her first draft.

Do not think that you can get away with bad spelling and grammar. You can't. If your handling of the language is clumsy, no editor or agent is going to want to spend the time to slog through figuring out what you actually meant even if you have the most fantastic story in the world. If your writing is unreadable, it will not get read.

If an editor or agent asks you for a partial manuscript (or a full one!), follow up with that request. And send specifically what you get asked for. Don't send a full manuscript when you're asked for a partial. "Oh, they'll love my book, so I'll just make it easier for them and send them the whole thing" is a bad myth. It'll just annoy the agent or editor and make them think that you're not capable of following a simple request. And if you never send them anything, it'll make them wonder why you bothered to pitch your story to them in the first place.

"Revising my work is like killing my baby!" Okay, I can sympathize with this some. It's hard to edit. I know. I've done it. But this is exactly why mizkit advised me to step away from the first draft of Faerie Blood for no fewer than six weeks after I finished it, to allow myself some time to get the mental distance I needed to actually revise it. And to realize an important thing: you're not killing your baby. You're making it BETTER.

If an editor sends you a list of reasons why your work has been rejected, this is NOT to be interpreted as "you suck, and here is a list of reasons why!" Rather, they're giving you feedback. See previous notes re: why feedback is good. It's meant to help you improve your work. If you get this kind of a reply from an editor, you should strongly consider sending them your next piece.

It is vital to remember that the editor is NOT OUT TO GET YOU. He or she is there to help you figure out what's wrong with the story--to fix it and make it better and therefore more likely to sell to readers. It is not the editor's job to figure out what's right with the story. That's YOUR job.

"A critique group/editor will steal my idea!" Untrue. Anyone reputable will do no such thing. This also ties in with the common practice of trying to notarize one's own manuscripts before sending them out, or mailing oneself a copy of them, or such.

"Collaborating is half as easy as writing the book by yourself." NOPE! Not only does the book still have to get written, but you have to spend extra time working with your partner to come up with something that accommodates BOTH of your ideas as to how the work should come out.

"Inspired ideas are better than the ones you have to work for." So far it's been my experience that inspiration comes in tiny pieces rather than in one huge shining burst of illumination. If you're waiting for that burst, don't. Other writers' mileage may vary, but so far the stories I've been planning have all started with a few scattered concepts that I picked up, held together, and started asking myself about how I could arrange them into a story. Faerie Blood, for example, began life as a single scene I wrote years ago about a girl watching an Elvis impersonator contest in which one of the contestants was an elf. FB has hugely changed since then, and as a story it bears absolutely no resemblance to the idea I had in mind when I wrote that scene. Waiting around for that burst of illumination is going to keep you from doing what you need to do to succeed as a writer, and that's to WRITE.

"All it takes is one lucky break." Um, no. Even if you sell a novel (the "lucky break" that people generally seem to mean when they're talking about this particular myth) to a publisher, there's no guarantee that once that book hits the shelves, people will actually buy it. There's also no guarantee that you will continue to sell books even if your first one does well. The work does not stop just because you manage to get one contract.



I didn't actually take notes during Elizabeth MS Flynn's "Pop Culture Heroines and What We Can Learn From Them" panel, though not for any particular reason. Ms. Flynn also suffered unfortunate technical difficulties, too. Her panel was meant to be a slide presentation on her Macintosh, showing a bunch of comic book panels, photos, and such featuring pop culture heroines going clear back into the 30's. But she wasn't able to scare up a cable to connect her computer to the screen projector, which meant that the folks in the back of the room didn't get to see the stuff on her computer screen. It also meant that most of the hour was spent just covering the various heroines and less on what as writers we might actually glean from them--which was the part I was hoping for.

Still, it was a fun lineup of pop culture heroines, and I learned about several characters I'd had no idea existed before (like Batwoman, a 50's-era, extremely short-lived predecessor to Batgirl).



The Sizzle Workshop, given by Alisa McKnight, was all about writing SEX! And that was, as one might expect, fun. ;)

It was very funny to me how a lot of her pointers on writing good sex scenes reminded me of issues I saw cropping up time and again in sex scenes played out on MUSHes. The vast majority of them were never interesting to me, which is why I stopped doing them after a while, and apparently these same problems can wreck a sex scene in print, too. Problems such as:

• Sex scenes have to have a reason to be in the story, to contribute to that story; something has to happen besides just 'sex'. It does nothing to further the plot if the characters just decide to jump into the sack together.
  
• "Don't give the choreography," Alisa said, "give the people." In other words, don't make it just be all about the physical details of what goes where. Focus on the emotional engagement of the characters and why they're reacting.
  
• There's nothing worse than having to look up a word during a sex scene--so don't try to show off your vocabulary at that point! If your reader has to stop to reach for the dictionary, it totally breaks the tension of the scene.
  
• Don't short the orgasm. You don't want to make the reader blink and miss it.
  
• Research is as vital in a sex scene as it is for any other part of a book. Especially if you're writing kinky sex.
  
• The people in a sex scene should actually be good together.
  
• Any point where you can't keep track of whose parts are whose is a point where you have too many people in a sex scene.
  
• Love scenes happen between people, not genders. (I like this notion.)

Some other points:

• Like any other scene, a sex scene can be driven by actions or by the characters reacting to what has happened beforehand. If the characters have some sort of other tension going on, that can be the driving conflict of a scene. For example, think about a woman thinking, "I'm so angry, should I kick his ass or have sex with him?"
  
• It is absolutely okay to actually interrupt the sex for the purposes of excitement and tension. E.g., the villain walking in on the hero and heroine at the critical moment.
  
• Detail makes a sex scene sexy. Engage all the senses in your descriptions. Your language is vital. Use the words that your POV character(s) would use, and not only just how they'd think of sex organs; think of all the other details they would notice as well.
  
• Try the technique of zooming in to focus in exquisite detail on something, then zoom back out and summarize a bit, then zoom in on something else.
  
• Emotion is vital to the scene.
  
• Think about action and reaction. Have your POV character reacting to what gets done!
  
• Not only is it okay to get titilatted by your own sex scene, you should. Because it's all about making the reader passionate about what you are passionate about.
  
• Not every sex scene has to be on camera! If the characters having sex on camera wouldn't actually enhance the story, don't have them do it! (I'm a big fan of fade-to-blacks myself. Or if I'm reading Elizabeth Peters, the ever-so-succinct scene closer "Oh, Emerson!" >:) )
  
• Show the followup to the sex as appropriate.
  
• Sex scenes are a great way to put your characters on the spot--right then, they are at their most vulnerable. Think about this when arranging how a sex scene is going to contribute to the story.
  
• If you are doing a group sex scene, try focusing on a specific character and give them a really strong goal or motive to drive the scene from their POV.

And there is no better place at a writer conference to see Sizzle in action than at a Fanfic/Slash Reading, which is how several of us spent Friday night. Muahaha!

alg showed up with fanfic, as did her comrade in crime Kassandra. I think one other person and I were the only others who actually had fic readily accessible; everyone else who read something wrote it on the spot, which was pretty fun and cool, as it was neat to see what they came up with. It probably also helped that there was alcohol involved.

Anna read a huge chunk of Kassandra's Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fic set in the latter stretches of the series--where the characters are old enough that it starts to be kind of okay if it's slash. She never actually made it to the sex, but the setup was actually interesting. Lots of amusing confrontational scenes between Harry and Draco as they start meeting one another for tea and biscuits and conversation in the kitchens late at night, and lots of angst out of Harry about the course of his life. Draco was good in the story in the function of poking holes in all of Harry's angst.

casirafics read a very funny Doctor Who (current Doctor)/Jack piece that she whipped up on the spot, following up on a quick wry exchange in "Boom Town"--which I just finally watched, so now I get it. Hee. In this piece, Jack does in fact buy the Doctor a drink--and we learn exactly what kind of alcohol is required to conquer the Gallifreyan constitution. ;)

Alisa (the same Alisa who held the Sizzle Workshop!) read an improv Battlestar Galactica Kara/Lee piece, following up on "Colonial Day".

And I went "okay FINE" and went up to the front of the room and read my favorite scene out of my five and a half chapters of my Virtuosity fanfic, "Iterations": the first time SID 6.7B and Jen meet. It was very gratifying to get some loud cheers when I told the room, "This is Russell Crowe movie fandom!" And it was rather funny how reading that scene out loud delivered rather more innuendo than I'd originally intended when I wrote it. ;>

Then Anna (Genoese, not me; I keep feeling funny talking about another Anna like this! ^_^) read one of her own pieces--a Due South fic. I've never watched the show, but she's a good writer, and has a periodic succinct way with a phrase that fell really well upon my ear. A fine, fine closer to the entire evening, after which we finally all staggered off to bed.

Comments

[kaseido.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for doing these - it's the next best thing to having been there, and a really helpful counterpoint for me to Allie's behind-the-scenes perspective.

[annathepiper]

You're most welcome! :) I'm glad to hear that they're good reading!

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

yeah...keep doing this! Since I never get to actually go to anything but the kitchen and Costco...

[annathepiper]

I shall indeed! Day 3 will be coming today! Possibly also Day 4, since I am scampering up to Vancouver tomorrow with jessicac and mamishka, and will therefore not be at my keyboard for most of the day. :)