Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 2

I’d like to call Friday the 31st of August my hero day, since I went to 6 panels starting from 9:00 in the morning and ending at 21:00 in the evening.

The first panel was a classic one – “how to get an agent”. There is at least one of those at every worldcon. Since usually they don’t have the same participants, it does remain interesting to go there and listen to the different stories on how authors found their agents. If I remember correctly three authors and one agent had gathered, the agent again being Joshua Bilmes from Jabberwocky.

One of the authors got her agent at a writer conference during a pitch session, which reminded me painfully of my Hollywood times where I have been to such sessions as well. I found them to be rather horrible and am much more comfortable with writing a query letter, but the lady who got her agent that way says she could not write query letters so decided to go to (and pay for) a pitch session.

She’s an exception though, in most cases it starts with the query letter, and the query letter advice mentioned during the panel was classic stuff: tell the agent in the first sentence what you have (genre, word count), give a short synopsis, then some biographical information. If you have no publication yet, find something else you can talk about. Talk about the favorite movie that the agent might have mentioned in his blog or on his website or talk about where you went to college or whatever, but do mention something so that the agent knows you are not a robot.

Some agents like it when the query letter starts with a smart-ass question, but some agents, Joshua Bilmes being one of them, hates that, so don’t do it with him.

An interesting number was mentioned, your query letter should have a 30 to 40% response rate (meaning requests for a partial resulting from it) or otherwise it is crap. I haven’t heard that statistics before yet. Interesting. My latest query letter, sent out four times so far, generated two requests = 50%. Maybe I was plain lucky or I am finally getting it right?

Next, I went to “self-editing for fiction writers” where five authors discussed about their writing process and how they self edit.

Jeanne Cavelos from Odyssey workshop moderated the panel and I am one of her graduates from all the Odyssey Online courses. I joined the first Odyssey Online course in 2010 and it was my first time to meet Jeanne in the flesh.

Some hints from the self editing panel: Of course every writer is different and you have to find out what works best for you by yourself but here are some techniques you might want to apply:

a) Let the manuscript rest for a bit after you have finished it, write something else, then come back to it for the edit (or subsequent edits).

b) Change the font to get a new fresh impression of your manuscript.

c) The medium affects the perception, print your manuscript out and read it on paper for a change.

d) Make a list of what you need to change after the first draft

e) Search your documents for repetitions, all those, “of course”, “just”, “he smiled”, “she shrugged”, and so forth.

f) Read how-to books (“Self-editing for Fiction Writers” for example is a great one, I already read it myself).

g) If you want to write a series, take a series you like and analyze it, why do you like it, what makes it a good series?

h) Write plot cards and juggle them around.

i) Outline after the draft is done in case you are a gardener writer type (gardener = you have a rough idea where you are going but make up stuff as you go along (I am that type), architect = you plan out everything in minute detail before you start to write).

j) Always re-ask yourself what the theme of your book is.

Just some tips that you might want to try out for yourself. I will definitely test the different font, since I haven’t tried that trick yet.

Another craft panel followed right after that for me – “beyond the first two pages”. You’ve polished your first two pages until you drop, but how do you get things flowing throughout the dreaded second act.

Interestingly, I made not too many notes during this panel. I think it was mostly because it went a bit astray from the topic and the writers on the panel were mostly talking about their general writing process. One thing I did make a note of was the phrase “hooking the reader”, rather think of it as “tantalizing” the reader. Make him want to read the next sentence with every sentence that you write and always ask yourself who is telling the story and why.

After a late lunch I went to what they call Kaffeeklatsches at the worldcon. I love that expression because it is German. I think these sessions got their name from the idea of a kaffeeklatsch as being an informal meeting, but to me as a German kaffeeklatsch sounds like old ladies gathering and gossiping about their neighbors!  Anyway, worldcon kaffeeklatsches are informal meetings with one person of interest and you have to sign up for them in the morning in advance and after eight or ten people have gathered, the kaffeeklatsch is full and no more members may attend.

I managed to sign up for a kaffeeklatsch with agent Eddie Schneider, the new apprentice of Joshua Bilmes from Jabberwocky agency. To remain with the German metaphors we “asked holes into his stomach” and that is what kaffeeklatsches are for, you may ask an agent or an author, editor etc. questions about his field of expertise or his/her books. We of course were all authors without an agent and thus asking Eddie questions upon questions. 75 minutes of that are hard to revisit in a few words.

The general gist was that you need to make your homework and research, research and research again, then polish and polish and polish your manuscript and over-, over- and over-polish your query letter.

A nice gesture of Eddie was that he said simply by being at the con and learning stuff and asking him, we have already elevated ourselves above the 90% of complete crap queries he receives and allowed us to skip the first step of querying him, which is query letter only. We were allowed to send in our first few chapters of our best work mentioning that we were his kaffeeklatsch clientele at the worldcon. That’s very nice of him and of course I have done that first thing after returning home and am waiting for now his reply.

The next panel was funny and quirky at the same time – “how to not get published” – some advise from author Jack McDevitt. He held the panel alone, which I found interesting, maybe he does not want to deal with other panelists. Also a tactic how to avoid an awkward panel

Some of the points he mentioned as for how to make an editor (or agent) reject your manuscript:

1) Don’t overwrite – don’t write too much and say too little.

2) Don’t tell a story but create an experience.

3) Keep factual information to a minimum but the little you do have must be correct.

4) Don’t get lost in detail (e.g. don’t describe how an FTL (faster than light) engine works, get on with it by saying, he pushed a button!

5) Don’t underestimate your reader.

6) Keep characters to a necessary minimum (don’t have too many characters).

7) Don’t introduce four characters at once, let them do something one after the other.

8) Get your grammar etc. right.

9) Create conflict (don’t bore the reader).

10) Have flawed protagonists (don’t write one or two dimensional characters).

11) Don’t write stilted dialogue.

12) Don’t withhold from the reader what the main character knows.

13) Don’t explain.

14) Don’t let exiting things happen off stage.

15) Don’t describe too much but avoid white room syndrome.

All of that was/is valid advice and it was good to be reminded of it in this intensive 75 minute lecture package.

Last but not least for this busy day, I went to a panel about electronic publishing.

The essence of this quite diverse panel was that electronic publishing is here to stay but the common opinion was that paper will also stay.

Some interesting things from this panel that I found noteworthy are:

There are only two forms in which humans absorb information: a codex and a scroll. A codex is a book (magazine, newspaper) and a scroll has come back to fashion these days with our electronic devices where you indeed scroll through any sort of text.

The other, totally unrelated, thing I took away from this panel was that electronic publishing opens up, or revives, all sorts of manuscript lengths. In print you find mostly short story collections or novels = something you can hold in your hand in book form and that has a decent size. The scrolling on electronic devices opens up the so far rather difficult length of being published in between 30,000 and 70,000 words = the novella might become more popular again.

So much for my day two of Chicon 7. More to follow next week.