Chicon 7 Panel Reports – Part 3
Since I want to finish my Chicon 7 panel report within September, I am combining days 3-5 of the Worldcon into 2 blog entries with reports on four panels each.
On the 3rd Worldcon day I found myself entering controversial territory.
The first panel I attended on Sunday was called “Social Media for Writers”.
The general gist of this panel was you gotta do it and the more you do of it the better.
I have a bit of a different take on that simply because I am not in the luxurious position of being a professional full time writer. Since 99.99 % of all writers do happen to have dayjobs, I am strongly opposed to what I would like to call the social media bubble. Yes, it is necessary and yes, you gotta be out there and yes, you need to have a facebook page as an author these days, but instead of tweeting five hours a day, you should sit behind your computer and write or revise, for heaven’s sake.
Social media must in my opinion be handled with balance.
I personally have a website, this blog here where I post once a week on a fairly regular basis, sometimes a bit more when “stuff” is going on. I am on facebook and I am on twitter but on the latter two I usually show myself only on weekends. I simply do not have the time for tweet conversations and stuff like that, I rather spend the precious non-dayjob time that I have writing, or revising, or researching, or critiquing, or reading, or submitting, or socializing with real-life friends than being available on twitter 24 hours a day.
I think twitter and facebook can be great traps that can drain energy which would be much better spent writing your next book, since, as we have heard, you need a critical mass out there for people to notice you. That means you gotta write and publish, may it be traditionally or otherwise, instead of wasting your time with twitter chit chat. I am relatively sure that the social media hype will fall back on some writers who do too much of it, it will drain them of their creative energy.
Of course there are these “glorious” examples of writers who found their agent or publisher or whatever via twitter, but they are the minority, the rest is in danger of falling into the social media trap and never getting that third or fourth novel written.
Another panel I went to that day had the amazing title “Quantum Physics and Magic Realism”. I didn’t really expect much of it but was pleasantly surprised when I found myself really enjoying the discussion.
Now what exactly is magic realism?
The “definition” given by panelist Catherynne M. Valente is: (not an exact quote) a book written in a journalistic style in order to tell a story that exists on the fringes of reality and plays into politics. But ask someone else and you will get another definition – there is no definition chiseled in stone for the term.
What people agree on though is that the South Americans “invented” it – most of all Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But Kafka’s Metamorphosis can also be considered to be one of the first magic realism stories.
Rather than listing here now the works that were more or less briefly discussed during this panel, I would like to point out something Catherynne said that I really liked.
In our day and age the term “post modernism” has sorts of become a synonym for “good” and now “magic realism” is also starting to aspire to that honor. Funny how we are twisting things. A great panel with some food for thought.
I did not go to the final panel that I attended for Worldcon Day 3 for its contents but rather because Gene Wolfe was on the panel and I wanted to see him in action at least once. The panel’s topic was “How to conquer writers block”. Now that is something I luckily have never experienced so far. I always rather tend to have to stop myself from writing and to go back to revising what I have already written.
Nevertheless there were some interesting tips that I shall now pass along.
Gene Wolfe’s main advice was – if you are blocked, go away from words and language, switch off the TV, don’t read, but walk the dog or dig in the garden or do some sports, then it’ll come back to you after you have cleared your mind.
Another thing is to have a routine. His is to write two pages a day when the novel starts, then he speeds up gradually as he goes along and things become clearer to him (he’s also a gardener, not an architect) and by the end, because he knows how it will end, he writes 15 pages a day and catches himself rushing the ending. So his advice in that direction was, don’t do what I do and don’t rush the ending.
Another piece of wisdom or advice from Gene Wolfe was – if the writer is bored it will come across on the page. As the author you have to cry and laugh and giggle and squirm behind your keyboard, if you don’t do that how can the reader? Meaning, if you don’t do that, the story is probably crap and you should abandon it and write the next one.
On Sunday, Worldcon day 4, my first panel was about the SF markets in India and China.
There are some 2.5 or more billion people in those two countries but we don’t know much about them in terms of SF and fantasy.
There is a thriving SF community in China with their main publications of course being in Chinese and not much of it is translated into English. Although SF is by far not the most popular genre in China, simply due to the sheer masses of people the sales figures are something authors in the rest of the world can only dream about. The apparently most successful Chinese SF novel series is called “Three Bodies” that sold some 600,000 copies. The magazine “SF World” is China’s biggest SF publication and the Chinese SF association has some 35,000 members, again, numbers the rest of the world can only dream about.
The main problem is that translations are rare and the rest of the world does not know anything about Chinese SF.
The picture in India is a little different. India is blessed and cursed by the English language one panelist said and for historical reasons there has always been easy access to English books in India but the “cool stuff” is happening in Hindi or Bengali or Tamil. The problem there being that the different languages need to be translated into each other or English as well. For us “westerners” both markets are largely unknown and the major problem remains translation.
Translation in itself is also a major problem, because translations are not being paid for very well and the translator does not receive proper credit for his or her outstanding work.
Stay tuned for the my last Chicon 7 panel report next week with more stuff about self-publication, wokshopping and genre bending.
