SIWC, Over for 2012

Well, I just got back from my final sessions at the 2012 Surrey International Writers’ Conference. I must say, it’s a great conference. This was my fourth or fifth time attending, but it had been at least five years since the last time I went, and I had forgotten what the experience was like.

Since that time, I have attended a lot of cons. Mainly science fiction/fantasy cons like OreCon, RadCon, World Fantasy–things like that. The SIWC is a completely different animal. For those of you who have never gone, I recommend you checking it out. It’s a much more professional atmosphere than the other cons I mentioned (well, except for maybe World Fantasy, which is a con full of stuffed shirts, if you ask me); there’s nobody dressed up as Klingons or pirates walking around. Just a lot of writers (around eight hundred, I think?) and a whack of editors and agents all trying to hook up together. There’s no Tor parties with unlimited free alcohol, thank God. That way only leads to badness.

I did attend an Romance Writers’ of America party last night. It wasn’t bad. I was an RWA member maybe a half dozen years ago, although I never really managed to finish a romance novel. I have an almost-done romantic comedy kicking around somewhere, but it has that weird Michael Hiebert twist running through it that makes it mostly unmarketable.

Anyway, back to SIWC.

And there’s lectures. Even these tend to be on a different level than the SciFi Cons. Not that there’s anything wrong with the sessions at all those other cons, it’s just that at Surrey, you feel much more like you’re in school. I think you learn a lot more. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the caliber of presenters? Maybe it’s just because of the air of professionalism that they come better prepared or, perhaps I should say, more prepared to deliver a well-crafted teaching.

Here’s a brief overview of the sessions I attended and what I got out of them (he says, getting out his notepad):

The Deadly Dozen was all about the twelve biggest sins writers make while writing mysteries. Since I write mysteries, I thought this was a pretty good bet to start off the conference on. It wasn’t a bad session, although most of the advice was common sense. Sometimes, though, being reminded of common sense stuff is good. The problems we were told to avoid ranged from things like “Making the killer the least likely suspect” to “Having the cops do the stupidest things possible”. Of course, there were the tried and true ones in there too, like having the female protagonist chase the villain into the abandoned warehouse alone, unarmed, without backup. Stuff like that.

The next session was all about using backstory. I attended this one mainly because it was put on by Diana Gabaldon, whom I’ve had a major crush on since the first time I ever attended the SIWC. Diana is a great public speaker, but she talks really fast. All of the sessions were supposed to run an hour and a half. She went for a half hour and stopped and said, “Well, that’s about all I can tell you about backstory. Any questions?”

Her advice was practical. If you need backstory to write your book, come up with it, but throw it out before writing (or at least 90%) of it. The other 10% can come out naturally through dialogue (providing it is done naturally and not in an, “Well, as you know, Bob . . . ” kind of way) or in flashbacks or weaved throughout the narrative. Something else she does in her historical romances is what she calls shadow narration. Have the author insert a bit of backstory right after a character says something, so it’s almost like author intrusion. Just do it in a way that isn’t so obvious.

The key, she said, is to pull on backstory only when you need it and then to only give out as much as you need to make the reader understand the story. Keep the rest secret. That’s what the backstory is: a secret story you know and the readers only glimpse through the characters’ actions.

She than filled some of the remaining time reading bits from her new book that use backstory in different ways as examples. She’s a great reader. Hearing her read was worth the price of admission.

My final session on day one was Linda Gerber’s Plotting with Four Act Structure. I went to this because I was interested to see what the heck four act structure is, being quite familiar with three act structure myself. turns out her “four” act structure is exactly like my three act structure with a division made at the Act II Midpoint that she then uses to divide Act II into two acts (Act II and Act III), making my Act III her Act IV. Otherwise, it’s pretty much identical.

So I didn’t get too much out of that one. I did actually get to disagree with her on three different points throughout the class, though and that was fun. Sometimes I enjoy being a shit disturber. Luckily, Ms. Gerber is a very nice lady with little to no ego who takes critique very graciously.

That was it for day one. Day two started with a session on researching called Beyond Wikipedia. There was some good stuff here. It was mainly a group session with everyone throwing out questions and answers and the instructor sort of moderating the whole thing. Some great ideas about where to go to find out things for your novel came to the surface, such as: university libraries, old catalogs and newspapers, google scholar (which I’d never heard of), jstor (again, never heard of it), questia (ditto on this one, too), and so on.

I found out there’s a book the size of a doorstop called Cassell’s Slang Dictionary which tells you the first time and place a slang word was ever used. I can see this book being a tremendous addition to my collection, especially for anything I write set in the past. I’m going to try and find a copy online.

I also found out that if you’re writing fantasy, you’re spells should not be cast in Latin the way everyone is doing it (ala Harry Potter), but Hebrew. That’s the way spells were cast back then. Hebrew is considered the first language. Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew.

Next session up was one of the most interesting of the entire conference for me: Taking Control–Advanced Social Media by Sean Cranbury. This one was all about making sure you maximize your web presence and how to get your sales and marketing numbers up using the Internet.

A lot of fantastic ideas came out of this lecture. Mr. Cranbury has a friend who publishes eBooks with sales up in the 120,000 unit range at $ 3.99 a pop, and he shared with us the secret to how to attain those numbers. I am anxious to try some of these marketing methods, especially once Dolls is fully released.

I ended up going to two lectures next, because my first choice sort of sucked after fifteen minutes into it. Well, I shouldn’t say that. To be fair, it was probably a decent lecture, just not for me. It was on outlining and, once inside, I realized, since I sell on proposal, my outlining skills are already as good as what was being described by the instructor, so I wasn’t going to get anything out of it. So I quietly left and found myself another class.

Which found me in another of Linda Gerber’s lectures. She’s the one I argued with about four act structure the day before. This time she was talking about writing mysteries for teens and tweens and I must say, it was a great session. I found out later, she’s got a lot of books published. She knows her stuff.

There was a bit of spill over between this session and the one I’d taken the morning before on the twelve deadly sins of mystery writing, but all in all I still got a lot out of it. I especially enjoyed her lists of common stereotypes in young adult fiction to avoid. Things like best friends always being red heads, token black friend who is usually a girl, nasty girl whose on the cheerleader squad, quiet and artsy girl who hangs out by herself. The list went on and on.

Again, there were a lot of common sense things mentioned as far as mystery goes, but it’s good to be reminded of these things because we do forget. That’s why we continue to see them showing up in books, movies and television shows. Especially television shows:

Avoid “the clue that changes everything”

Avoid “Deus Ex Machina”

Don’t use schizophrenia as a plot device.

Don’t solve the story’s main problem with adult intervention.

Avoid cliches.

Remember the rule of Chekhov’s gun: if you show a gun in chapter one, that gun had better be shot before the end of Act III.

That ended day two, which led to today. Today was a short day with only two lectures. The first one I had been dreading all weekend because, as some of you know, I have gut-wrenching, terrifying stage fright. So what do I decide to participate in? The session on Reading Your Work. And we were supposed to bring some of our work with us to read in front of the group.

I was third. My knees knocked. My arms shook. By the middle of my piece, it was terribly obvious. I actually stopped reading and said, “This is crazy.”

The instructor was very nice and said I have a great reading voice and that nobody noticed me shaking at first, but it had gotten worse as I went which she found very peculiar. I said, “No, it’s not peculiar. I’m terrified.”

Anyway, she gave me some helpful suggestions and was very supportive.

I think she was just being nice.

And that brings me to my final session of the day which I just got home from. It was called Editing Your Own Work and the instructor didn’t seem to know what it was actually on. She sort of asked the class what they wanted to take away from it, and everyone came up with something different.

It was good, though. She gave us an interesting exercise. She handed out a sheet of prose and told us to edit it. I put maybe a dozen marks on it. I was careful to make sure that every mark I made I could back up with why I had done it–for instance, there were places where a semicolon had been used to split two predicates that had a common subject, which, to the best of my knowledge is a no no.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is: the piece was taken directly from a published book by Hemingway.

Go figure.

I still stand by my edits. I guess when you’re Hemingway nobody edits your punctuation on you.

That’s about it. All in all, a good conference. I think I’ll be back next year.

Michael out.