Writer's Weekend, Day 3--Saturday 6/11/05
Jul. 11th, 2005 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThis post is of course severely late--but this is what I get for huge sudden alterations in my duties at work. But hey. I may be slow, but I eventually get there. This therefore is the writeup for Day 3 of this year's Writer's Weekend!
My first adventure of the morning was my pitch with Evan Fogelman, about which I'd been nervous pretty much ever since I registered. First time pitching face to face to an agent, after all! The Query, Pitch, Synopsis panel had helped allay some of my nervousness, but there were still butterflies in my stomach as I joined the queue of other folks waiting to go in and talk to the various agents who'd taken over the conference room for the pitch appointments. Liz Wolfe and Sarah Avery and other folks were doing a fabulous job keeping everyone organized and double-checking that the people who were slated for various time slots were actually present. I didn't have long to wait, either, since things moved along pretty well. When my time came, I pulled in a big breath and went in to do it.
"How are you?" was pretty much the first thing Mr. Fogelman said to me, to which my answer was "desperately nervous". He assured me I didn't need to be. And that pretty much set the tenor of the whole conversation: friendly, professional, straightforward. I started off with the "I'd like to tell you about the book I have at Luna right now" line, which seemed to work really well, and I got into talking a bit about the history I'd had with the manuscript so far (i.e., partial sent twice to Tor, the scribbled note that said I was too wordy, the subsequent rejection). He asked me if I was a wordy writer; I told him I thought so but that I was working on trying to fix that. I didn't actually make it all the way through my pitch--I was trying the six-slide version, as it turned out--but that seemed to be okay. The one point of consideration he raised with me was to say that he wanted to know if my lesser characters in the plot were kind of crowding out my heroine, too.
Since then, he has sent me a form rejection--but I do have to say that it was still pleasant to chat with him, nevertheless! It helped make me a lot less nervous about talking to Nadia Cornier later that same day, and I think it'll help me be less nervous about talking to agents in general. Which is good, because I'll be doing this again at next year's Writer's Weekend, I'm sure.
In keeping with the overall genre-crossing theme of this year's conference was the panel "Crossing the Line: Combining Genres in Fiction". This was moderated by Nadia Cornier, Matt Ruff, Wendy Roberts, and Yasmine Galenorn--and I believe this was the first time during the conference that I actually clued in that Yasmine Galenorn was a local writer and that she was someone I'd actually already read. (I'd read her novel Ghost of a Chance some months back, since it was set more-or-less locally and I have a soft spot for novels set in the Pacific Northwest, as I've mentioned. It was pretty cool to actually think 'Hey wait, I've read something by this person!' It was equally cool to see Matt Ruff on the panel, for the same reason--thanks to having read Sewer, Gas, & Electric.
The panel itself was all about writing books that can't be neatly tucked into a given genre, and the panelists told us that genre in general should be thought of as a marketing issue as well as a marketing tool. This comes into play with several different aspects of the book.
The cover is important when you're trying to market to different genres. Different stores may file a genre-bending book in different places, and often, if they can't figure out where to put it, you'll wind up in general fiction. (This can be something of a good thing, since sometimes the general fiction section hangs onto books longer than the genre-driven areas. It can be a catchall for both literary fiction and fiction that doesn't easily fit into any given genre.) But care still has to be taken if you're jumping genres with a new book--because if your covers look too much like the covers in your old genre, this might confuse your readers. It can also confuse reviewers, since even though genre-crossing is almost expected these days, how a given reviewer may react to such a thing in a book will still vary. As with any other aspect of reading, how well genre-crossing works will be a very subjective experience for any given reader.
One way to think about how to package a book that has aspects of multiple genres is to think of how baby food lists its ingredients: putting the primary ingredient first, with a major secondary ingredient listed second. "Fantasy with romantic elements" implies different things than "romantic fantasy".
An agent can help you organize your work and deadlines if you're genre-hopping, which can be very helpful--because you don't get to take your clout in a previous genre with you when you're hopping over into a new one. You may also find that your agent or editor might try to talk you out of it, if they think you'll hurt your ability to make money in a new genre. But if that's what you really want to do, stick by that!
And one last word of caution: genre-hopping is a hot thing right now in publishing. Don't try to write a genre-hopping book just for the sake of being 'hot'. There aren't any real original ideas--there's only original writing. And if you're writing character-driven fiction, what genre you're writing in is less important anyway than the precarious situations in which you place your characters.
I didn't catch all of the speech given by Alma Deckert, a.k.a. Alma Alexander, a.k.a. Alma Hromic. But I enjoyed listening to her speak while I was there, particularly her telling us about the impression she made upon an editor by bringing her manuscript to his office in person and just plunking herself down to wait until they agreed to see her. It was a wry, witty story, and the sort of thing that I'm sure many authors dream of getting away with.
One other thing she said is something I've heard a lot of ever since I started trying to pursue writing in earnest--but it's something that bears repeating. I.e., keep at it. Don't stop believing in yourself even after you get 26 rejections--because all it takes is one time, and that 27th time might be it.
I spent most of the booksigning following![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seimaisin around, pointing at various books, and telling her, "That's good, you should buy it." Hee. I got her to buy mizkit's Urban Shaman, Yasmine Galenorn's Ghost of a Chance, and Jim Butcher's Storm Front on the strength of recommendation alone. Go me!
Also, I got Kit to sign both my copy of Urban Shaman and the copy I'd purchased on behalf of my SF-loving boss. Very satisfying. And when I gushed at her that Evan Fogelman had asked me for a partial, she gave me a big hug. Jim Butcher was sitting right next to her, and he blinked and asked "what now?" and gave me a yay too. Also very satisfying.
And though I'd vowed to eschew book purchases (stupid budget), I did wind up buying Jim's The Furies of Calderon. Just because, well, y'know, Jim writes good books and stuff.
Eventually I made my way back over to the food nook to get into the queue for my pitch with Nadia Cornier. The queue this time was smaller, and I chatted a bit with Dee from Australia beforehand. It turned out that she actually was scheduled to pitch to Nadia just before I was--so she turned her timer over to me and asked me to flag her when she was done.
As with Evan, I found Nadia very pleasant to talk to, and the experience helped give me some more confidence about talking to agents in general. I have yet to hear back from her, so I can't really say yet if she's found the proof in my pudding, as it were--whether she actually is interested in my work. But now that I've gotten the experience of talking to a couple of agents under my belt, I feel a lot better about talking to agents in general. Hopefully I will have Lament of the Dove ready to pitch next year!
The only other panel I attended on Saturday was another Anna Genoese panel, somewhat confusingly titled "The Call to Action/Talk to the Hand". Jaime and I went to go sit in on that panel, not quite knowing what we were going to get. What we got turned out to be Anna (and Melissa Singer) addressing the topic of the Reluctant Hero.
I've heard a lot about the classical Hero's Journey, and Anna spent some time on it here too. She described it as a good way to construct a plot--but not a good way to construct a character. By way of example, Anna asked us to take Harry Potter, the heroine of Alias, and Ender of the Ender's Game books. None of them grow as characters; their hero's journeys do not make them heroic. In fact, in Anna's view, Harry actually regresses as a character and becomes more whiny. The same happens to the heroine of Alias, who has much tragedy befall her and spends way too much time whining about it.
This is a big problem with a character that's supposed to be heroic. You can't really define a good guy without first defining a bad one--because good guys don't go out and do good until something bad happens that they can fix. By the very nature of what they're doing, good guys are not proactive, they're reactive. But this also puts the heroic character in danger--especially if they are a reluctant hero--of becoming whiny if they stay reactive. At some point, the heroic character has got to make that decision to become proactive.
This is why Han Solo is such a fabulous reluctant hero. He has good, solid reasons to be a reluctant hero at the start of the action in the original Star Wars flicks. He is challenged on these reasons, and actively decides to do what he needs to do to step up and join the good guys.
Other things to watch out for: if you have a three-dimensional villain, readers will sympathize with him. So your hero needs to be all that much cooler, and your good must be well balanced against your evil. You must be sure to give a reluctant hero a damned good reason to be reluctant--and then make them make that jump into being proactive, finally. Keep an eye out for the differences in point of view treatments--the difference between the classical 'the narrator is always right' vs. the post-modern 'the narrator is just one of several points of view' is a difference you can utilize.
And lastly, think about the story you're telling and the moral conclusions you want to have your readers make.
Aside from the panels and other things mentioned above, Saturday night for me was pretty quiet at the conference. I skipped the banquet, though I did wind up scarfing a chocolate-covered strawberry off one of the tables when all the fun was over and done. Mostly, Jaime and I hung out in the food nook and chatted with folks, and in general had a lovely conclusion to the day.
More to come on the fourth and final post!
My first adventure of the morning was my pitch with Evan Fogelman, about which I'd been nervous pretty much ever since I registered. First time pitching face to face to an agent, after all! The Query, Pitch, Synopsis panel had helped allay some of my nervousness, but there were still butterflies in my stomach as I joined the queue of other folks waiting to go in and talk to the various agents who'd taken over the conference room for the pitch appointments. Liz Wolfe and Sarah Avery and other folks were doing a fabulous job keeping everyone organized and double-checking that the people who were slated for various time slots were actually present. I didn't have long to wait, either, since things moved along pretty well. When my time came, I pulled in a big breath and went in to do it.
"How are you?" was pretty much the first thing Mr. Fogelman said to me, to which my answer was "desperately nervous". He assured me I didn't need to be. And that pretty much set the tenor of the whole conversation: friendly, professional, straightforward. I started off with the "I'd like to tell you about the book I have at Luna right now" line, which seemed to work really well, and I got into talking a bit about the history I'd had with the manuscript so far (i.e., partial sent twice to Tor, the scribbled note that said I was too wordy, the subsequent rejection). He asked me if I was a wordy writer; I told him I thought so but that I was working on trying to fix that. I didn't actually make it all the way through my pitch--I was trying the six-slide version, as it turned out--but that seemed to be okay. The one point of consideration he raised with me was to say that he wanted to know if my lesser characters in the plot were kind of crowding out my heroine, too.
Since then, he has sent me a form rejection--but I do have to say that it was still pleasant to chat with him, nevertheless! It helped make me a lot less nervous about talking to Nadia Cornier later that same day, and I think it'll help me be less nervous about talking to agents in general. Which is good, because I'll be doing this again at next year's Writer's Weekend, I'm sure.
In keeping with the overall genre-crossing theme of this year's conference was the panel "Crossing the Line: Combining Genres in Fiction". This was moderated by Nadia Cornier, Matt Ruff, Wendy Roberts, and Yasmine Galenorn--and I believe this was the first time during the conference that I actually clued in that Yasmine Galenorn was a local writer and that she was someone I'd actually already read. (I'd read her novel Ghost of a Chance some months back, since it was set more-or-less locally and I have a soft spot for novels set in the Pacific Northwest, as I've mentioned. It was pretty cool to actually think 'Hey wait, I've read something by this person!' It was equally cool to see Matt Ruff on the panel, for the same reason--thanks to having read Sewer, Gas, & Electric.
The panel itself was all about writing books that can't be neatly tucked into a given genre, and the panelists told us that genre in general should be thought of as a marketing issue as well as a marketing tool. This comes into play with several different aspects of the book.
The cover is important when you're trying to market to different genres. Different stores may file a genre-bending book in different places, and often, if they can't figure out where to put it, you'll wind up in general fiction. (This can be something of a good thing, since sometimes the general fiction section hangs onto books longer than the genre-driven areas. It can be a catchall for both literary fiction and fiction that doesn't easily fit into any given genre.) But care still has to be taken if you're jumping genres with a new book--because if your covers look too much like the covers in your old genre, this might confuse your readers. It can also confuse reviewers, since even though genre-crossing is almost expected these days, how a given reviewer may react to such a thing in a book will still vary. As with any other aspect of reading, how well genre-crossing works will be a very subjective experience for any given reader.
One way to think about how to package a book that has aspects of multiple genres is to think of how baby food lists its ingredients: putting the primary ingredient first, with a major secondary ingredient listed second. "Fantasy with romantic elements" implies different things than "romantic fantasy".
An agent can help you organize your work and deadlines if you're genre-hopping, which can be very helpful--because you don't get to take your clout in a previous genre with you when you're hopping over into a new one. You may also find that your agent or editor might try to talk you out of it, if they think you'll hurt your ability to make money in a new genre. But if that's what you really want to do, stick by that!
And one last word of caution: genre-hopping is a hot thing right now in publishing. Don't try to write a genre-hopping book just for the sake of being 'hot'. There aren't any real original ideas--there's only original writing. And if you're writing character-driven fiction, what genre you're writing in is less important anyway than the precarious situations in which you place your characters.
I didn't catch all of the speech given by Alma Deckert, a.k.a. Alma Alexander, a.k.a. Alma Hromic. But I enjoyed listening to her speak while I was there, particularly her telling us about the impression she made upon an editor by bringing her manuscript to his office in person and just plunking herself down to wait until they agreed to see her. It was a wry, witty story, and the sort of thing that I'm sure many authors dream of getting away with.
One other thing she said is something I've heard a lot of ever since I started trying to pursue writing in earnest--but it's something that bears repeating. I.e., keep at it. Don't stop believing in yourself even after you get 26 rejections--because all it takes is one time, and that 27th time might be it.
I spent most of the booksigning following
seimaisin around, pointing at various books, and telling her, "That's good, you should buy it." Hee. I got her to buy mizkit's Urban Shaman, Yasmine Galenorn's Ghost of a Chance, and Jim Butcher's Storm Front on the strength of recommendation alone. Go me! Also, I got Kit to sign both my copy of Urban Shaman and the copy I'd purchased on behalf of my SF-loving boss. Very satisfying. And when I gushed at her that Evan Fogelman had asked me for a partial, she gave me a big hug. Jim Butcher was sitting right next to her, and he blinked and asked "what now?" and gave me a yay too. Also very satisfying.
And though I'd vowed to eschew book purchases (stupid budget), I did wind up buying Jim's The Furies of Calderon. Just because, well, y'know, Jim writes good books and stuff.
Eventually I made my way back over to the food nook to get into the queue for my pitch with Nadia Cornier. The queue this time was smaller, and I chatted a bit with Dee from Australia beforehand. It turned out that she actually was scheduled to pitch to Nadia just before I was--so she turned her timer over to me and asked me to flag her when she was done.
As with Evan, I found Nadia very pleasant to talk to, and the experience helped give me some more confidence about talking to agents in general. I have yet to hear back from her, so I can't really say yet if she's found the proof in my pudding, as it were--whether she actually is interested in my work. But now that I've gotten the experience of talking to a couple of agents under my belt, I feel a lot better about talking to agents in general. Hopefully I will have Lament of the Dove ready to pitch next year!
The only other panel I attended on Saturday was another Anna Genoese panel, somewhat confusingly titled "The Call to Action/Talk to the Hand". Jaime and I went to go sit in on that panel, not quite knowing what we were going to get. What we got turned out to be Anna (and Melissa Singer) addressing the topic of the Reluctant Hero.
I've heard a lot about the classical Hero's Journey, and Anna spent some time on it here too. She described it as a good way to construct a plot--but not a good way to construct a character. By way of example, Anna asked us to take Harry Potter, the heroine of Alias, and Ender of the Ender's Game books. None of them grow as characters; their hero's journeys do not make them heroic. In fact, in Anna's view, Harry actually regresses as a character and becomes more whiny. The same happens to the heroine of Alias, who has much tragedy befall her and spends way too much time whining about it.
This is a big problem with a character that's supposed to be heroic. You can't really define a good guy without first defining a bad one--because good guys don't go out and do good until something bad happens that they can fix. By the very nature of what they're doing, good guys are not proactive, they're reactive. But this also puts the heroic character in danger--especially if they are a reluctant hero--of becoming whiny if they stay reactive. At some point, the heroic character has got to make that decision to become proactive.
This is why Han Solo is such a fabulous reluctant hero. He has good, solid reasons to be a reluctant hero at the start of the action in the original Star Wars flicks. He is challenged on these reasons, and actively decides to do what he needs to do to step up and join the good guys.
Other things to watch out for: if you have a three-dimensional villain, readers will sympathize with him. So your hero needs to be all that much cooler, and your good must be well balanced against your evil. You must be sure to give a reluctant hero a damned good reason to be reluctant--and then make them make that jump into being proactive, finally. Keep an eye out for the differences in point of view treatments--the difference between the classical 'the narrator is always right' vs. the post-modern 'the narrator is just one of several points of view' is a difference you can utilize.
And lastly, think about the story you're telling and the moral conclusions you want to have your readers make.
Aside from the panels and other things mentioned above, Saturday night for me was pretty quiet at the conference. I skipped the banquet, though I did wind up scarfing a chocolate-covered strawberry off one of the tables when all the fun was over and done. Mostly, Jaime and I hung out in the food nook and chatted with folks, and in general had a lovely conclusion to the day.
More to come on the fourth and final post!