Tag Archives: Conferences

More advice on query letters from Agent Sorche Fairbank

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Deer enjoy salt licks. Don’t make me explain every joke, folks. Keep up!

Last weekend, as many of you know, I had the opportunity to attend my first writer’s conference.  At first I came out more on the negative side of that experience, but I have to admit that I received tons of great information and useful* advice (*actual usefulness to be determined).  I also heard a veritable wealth of direct contradictions, of course, about writing query letters.  One person on our panel would say “never include a bio” and the next person would say “always include a bio”.  One person would “tell us how it ends in the query” and the other would say “never give away the ending”.  Advice on query letters should be taken not with a grain of salt, but with an entire salt lick.

I’m really surprised that query letter advice doesn’t attract more deer.

Anyway, here is what super nice agent Sorche Fairbank (awesome name, huh?  How many of you are planning to put that in your next fantasy novel?  A show of hands?)  had to say about writing query letters:

#1: Don’t take the life out of your query letter – All this means is that your query letter should read like an extension of your book.  If you’ve written a heavy, self-serious historical war piece like my book The Notice, then your query letter should reflect that same gravity.  If you’ve written a comical memoir, then your query letter damn well better elicit a chuckle or two from the agent reading it.  Try to mimic your narrative and never lose the heart of what you’ve written.  If this sounds like a delicate dance, it’s because it is.  This is not nearly as simple as it might sound because your goal is to be concise (much more concise than your novel probably is) while also keeping your language true to your prose.

#2:  Who is your audience?  Who is your genre?  A no-brainer.  Research and spell out your genre and, ideally, briefly mention who your target audience is.  This will not always be clear to the agent reviewing your work.  Try to point them in the right direction of your market.

#3:  What is the protagonist/antagonist conflict?  This seems to be a pretty unanimously agreed upon point among the agent world.  Agents may disagree profoundly on things like structure and whether or not a bio is necessary, but they all seem to agree that your query letter should get to the heart of your book’s conflict.  And why shouldn’t it?  If your query letter has no conflict, why should they assume your book will?  You need to spell out who the protagonist is and who or what the narrator is and how the conflict between those two forces will result in decisions or choices that move the story through your standard beginning, middle, climax, end arc.

#4:  Remember the 4 S’s (Style, Story, Setting, Someone):  Sorche said something that sounded a lot like “you can only pick one of these” in your query letter, but I’m not sure I understood her correctly or perhaps she misspoke.  I don’t see how you could only pick one of these in a query letter.  You can’t base a whole query letter on “setting” without mentioning the story or “someones”, obviously.  Or at least that doesn’t make any sense to me.  Your query letter should incorporate your style and story, while briefly dispensing with the setting and detailing the key characters and their dynamics, as I mentioned above.  At any rate, remember the 4 S’s.  They seem pretty universal.

#5:  Discuss your platform:  I’ve blogged about this in other entries but you should discuss your platform.  What abilities do you have to ensure that this book is sold?  Do you have a considerable Twitter presence?  Do you do speaking engagements regularly at which this book could be sold?  Are you George Clooney (if you are, um…use that.).  I built this website partly to nurture my platform.  This site gives me a venue through which I can gain exposure, market my books, deal in mirth and snark, and attract others within the literary community.  This is really increasingly important in this economy, where agents and publishers are perhaps less willing to gamble on unknown writers with experimental or high-concept stories.

I don’t condone the lack of risk-taking.  Frankly, it annoys me.  But we still have to be practical.  It makes sense from a business standpoint and business is everything.  Hollywood does it too.  That’s why we get four Transformers movies and just as many Alvin & The Chipmunks “Squeakuels” (shudder) for every District 9 that comes out.

#6:  Author Bio or Contact:  Another thing on which agents seem to be in agreement is that contact information should come at the bottom of your query letter after your name.  If you’re like me, that goes against everything you ever learned about writing business letters.  But these aren’t business letters, they’re queries.  Checkmate!  As for bios, really study any agencies requirements and you’ll often find indications of how they feel about bios.  Some will tell you explicitly to give a brief paragraph about yourself.  If nothing about a bio is mentioned but the agency instructs you to keep your letter short, I say don’t feel obligated to include one.

NON-FICTION ADVICE

Sorche also gave a brief lecture on what to include in memoir queries.  Having just finished Naked in Korea, I thought her advice was worth repeating.  Firstly, agents need to know what about your memoir will attract readers to your story.  How will your narrative transcend the individual?  A memoir about your trip to Jamaica, for example, is useless if you don’t have an angle.  What happened in Jamaica?  Did you see a part of Jamaica that few people get to see?  Were you abducted and molested by howler monkeys?  (if that actually happened to anyone…I’m really sorry)  What I’m trying to say is that your memoir won’t matter to anyone but you if nothing interesting actually happened to you.  The memoir-verse is full of books by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Kofi Anan, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Snookie, and the Dalai Lama.  How are you going to compete with them if the only thing that happened in Jamaica was that you went to the beach?

Another point Sorche made is that you should mention if your book is the first to do something.  Also, why are YOU the best person to write it?  What it is about your experience or observations or humor that qualifies you to write the definitive memoir about that experience?  If you battled cancer, what can people learn from your battle with cancer that they can’t get anywhere else?  Always put your most interesting material first.

“Getting Published”: Notes from a Lecture by Chuck Sambuchino

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For those of you who don’t know him, Chuck Sambuchino is an author and industry expert from the fine city of Cincinnati, Ohio and he came to speak to us at our conference in Lexington this weekend.  I mentioned that his personality kind of rubbed some people the wrong way, but I found him to be probably the most helpful and insightful speaker at our conference.  Since I’m about to take credit here for his ideas, I’d like to plug him real quickly and tell you to go buy his book How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack, which is probably a hilarious read and has been optioned for motion picture production with Robert Zemeckis at the helm.  Robert Zemeckis, of course, is that famous director who hasn’t made a memorable movie since “Forrest Gump” (okay, “Cast Away” was pretty good).

Here was his best advice from the conference:

Here’s a picture of Sambuchino’s new book…Wait, THAT’S not his book. Huh. How about that startling coincidence?

1.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Most first books do not sell.  You shouldn’t write an entire trilogy before you’ve sold the first book, because it may all be a waste of time.  One advice excerpt I read even said to take your first manuscript and just stick in a drawer somewhere.  Move onto your next project because that book will never be published.  The upside is that now you’re ready to write a better second book.  Or an even better third.  The point is to keep writing and improve with the process and not become bitter when that first book doesn’t skyrocket you to success.

2.  Always come up with new ideas.  This kind of a follow-up to #1.  Even when you’re writing a book, be on the lookout for other ideas—even BETTER ideas.  Write them down religiously.  Some ideas are like slow-moving fireflies and others are like houseflies.  You have to snatch them while you can or they might be gone forever.  I keep a Word document of all my flowering ideas and as those ideas blossom, I transfer them over to their own Word documents where I can keep watering them and turning over new soil.  That’s why I currently have five projects in development.

3.  Steal other ideas!  Okay, this isn’t really stealing but it is okay to steal bits of information, leads, thoughts, sparks of creativity, etc. and make them your own.  What I do sometimes is take a book and look at the cover and try to imagine the story I would tell based on what little I know about the book.  Usually my ideas are vastly different than what the book really is about and might go in a completely different and even better direction (in my opinion).  That’s how my fantasy series that I’m working on came to be, and now I cannot WAIT to start writing those books.  Your idea could also be a follow-up idea to someone else’s story or something that happened in the news.  For instance, you might write a book on where the little girl from the mid-to-late 90s Pepsi commercials is now.  Is she hot now?  Is she single?  People might need to know these things!

4.  Steal from yourself!  Milk all your good ideas.  If you have a REALLY solid idea, maybe you can tweak it enough to use it in two books without the audience really picking up on it.  Maybe you can even use it twice in the SAME book.  How beautiful is that?  I’m in the process of stealing from myself right now, as luck would have it.  I came up with an awesome scene for a vampire novel but nothing to really tie a novel together.  What did I do?  I moved the vampire character to my fantasy series, which already had several cool ideas, and kept the scene.  Now the fantasy series is going to be EVEN COOLER!  My lesson:  When possible, always try to maximize your book’s AWESOMICITY.  I know “awesomeness” is already a word, but I like “awesomicity” or “wowability” or “mindblowntabulousness”.

5.  Don’t believe everything you read.  Sambuchino made the point of explaining that there is a wealth of great information on the Internet about query letter writing, publishing, editing, etc.  There is also a wealth of bad information (maybe he’s been to http://www.seanmchandler.com before…) .  The Internet and “How to” books are also riddled with egregious contradictions and I got to see this at play during the conference.  Query letters are a study in contradiction and sabotage.  One agent told me under no circumstances should a query letter have a bio and the next agent told me a query letter absolutely needs to have one.  Both were INSISTENT on their opinions.  Another agent said “Never give away the ending in your query” and another said “Your query must give us a sense of the resolution.”  Does this seem like shades of gray to anyone else?  You might be thinking, well obviously they can’t both be right.  The sad truth is that, well…They’re kind of both right AND wrong.  It falls on you to research any given agent’s preferences.  Agent blogs are a great source for these little nuances.  But, ultimately, it may be a total crapshoot that you have your query letter fashioned precisely to a given agent’s idiosyncrasies and preferences.  That’s why we send out 30 or 40 letters!

6.   When agents don’t respond, keep moving.  You can’t control what happens once a letter is in an agent’s hand.  An agent could spill hot coffee in his or her lap the moment he or she picks up your letter and decide to use your query letter as a napkin (if you sent a hard copy) instead of actually reading it.  An agent might sit down to read your letter about breakups the morning after he’s just had his heart broken by his mail-order Russian bride.  You don’t know, and you’ll never know!  You can’t control an agent’s disposition, so you just have to move on.  Consider how you can improve your book if you don’t get a response.  Consider how your book might have a stronger first chapter or hook.  Plan your next approach.  Every time you send out queries it should be like planning attacks on an old map of Europe during World War II.  Look at the pieces and plan your strategy.  Can you write a better query letter?  How are you going to take down those agencies and force your way in?  And don’t be afraid of just moving onto the next project.  Maybe that’s the one that will sell!

Wow, someone actually beat me to the punch on “Teen Wolf Mom”. I knew someone must have already swooped up that gem of an idea.

7.  MAKE MORE TIME for your writing.  Put away the remote.  Stop sleeping in.  If you’re a professional writer, that’s one thing, but if you’re a part-time something else and a part-time writer, like myself, you have to literally find a way to make more hours in the day.  Short of defying the laws of physics or building a pimped out DeLorean, you have to hone your schedule and your routine.  10 hours of sleep might sound tempting but we only need 8 and I can function on about 6 or 7.  That’s 3-4 more hours of writing!  “Mad Men” might be excellent, but do you really need to pair it with “Game of Thrones”, “The Killing”, “The Closer”, “The Mentalist”, “The Real Housewives of Zimbabwe”, “Teen Mom”, “Teen Wolf”, “Teen Wolf Mom”, “Teen Mom Wolf”, “Wolf Mom Teen”, and “American Ninja Warrior”?  No!  Pick a couple and devote the other lost hours to your hobby.  It’s easy to make time for the job that pays the best—tutoring, for me—because it’s not optional.  If you want to succeed at writing, you can’t let that be optional either.  Don’t give up.

Special thanks to Chuck Sambuchino for his advice and, once again, support the guy by visiting his site: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents and picking up his book How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack.

Inspiration from Barbara Kingsolver Part II: Electric Boogaloo

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I was much too harsh of one Barbara Kingsolver yesterday on my website, so I just wanted to follow up that post by saying that she pretty much rocked it this morning.  I was disillusioned yesterday that she only performed some of her more obscure material, when all the audience wanted to hear was “November Rain” and “Welcome to the Jungle”.  Well, she delivered the hits this morning and had some truly inspiring things to say.  Here are a few of my notes from today’s performance.

How much research should one do?  Kingsolver’s description of research sounded to me much like an inverted pyramid, with scores of research taking place at the beginning of the process (even before starting one’s novel) and then gradually narrowing/lessening as the book takes shape.  She said she put together over 100 pages of research alone on one of her books and, based on my research for “The Notice”, I have an easy time believing that.  Her one comment that stood out to me was that she struggled writing “The Poisonwood Bible” because she could not actually go to the Congo, so she had to find ways of getting there without actually going there (she said she visited Togo to ballpark the atmosphere and she read a lot of books).  I wanted to ask her why she didn’t simply rent the movie “Congo”.  I mean, what more could she need to know?

Describe the beginning of the writing process?  Kingsolver was adamant that the first thing one should be able to do when endeavoring to write a book is first know exactly what the book is about.  Can you describe your story in one sentence?  In one paragraph?  If you can’t tell what your story is about, then how can your reader?  It was a simple point but very obvious and meaningful and I felt it was worth repeating.  From there, what are the key themes of your story and what are the questions being answered within the context of those themes?  What questions aren’t you answering?  Finally, how do the characters you create embody those themes and questions?  Take “Lost”, for example, where science vs. faith was a recurring theme on the show and those elements were embodied by Jack & Locke.  Ultimately, those questions proved meaningless, as we all know (damn you, “Lost”!) but it was always very clear in whom those themes were personified.

What about rewriting? Barbara Kingsolver said one should always keep a large trash can next to one’s writing space and even though in this digital age that may not pack quite the punch it once did, the core idea is still there:  Don’t be afraid of deleting material.  She said she once did 70 drafts of a first chapter and I’m not entirely sure she was joking.  One person laughed, though.  She also emphasized that “leapfrogging” (I’m borrowing her expression) is perfectly okay, where perhaps you are stuck on a scene and you just bounce to the next one.  I’ve done it myself but it’s nice to know that even someone of her stature does the same thing.  If you don’t have the words for the scene you’re on, write down the words that you do have.  For me, it’s kind of like doing a puzzle.  Imagine you’re doing a puzzle of a tiger and you know it’s a tiger, but you only find pieces of the right eye or the left eye or an ear or the nose first so you work on those as you find pieces for them.  The stripes will be hardest part but they’ll come; you just have to be patient.

Why are there no Ben & Jerry’s Barbara Kingsolver ice cream flavors?  Okay, I obviously stopped paying attention for about fifteen minutes during her lecture because all I could think about was ice cream and what a hippie Miss Kingsolver is (I say that affectionately).  So I started cranking out flavors based on her work with moderate success.

  • “Figs in Heaven” (figs, obvi, with a chocolate-strawberry swirl and…I don’t know, chunks of ham?)
  • “Boysenwood Bible Berry Bubble Gum” (boysenberries, bits of bubble gum, and a Bible verse swirl…I like swirls, what can I say?)
  • “Animal, Vegetable, Creamsicle” (bacon bits and cucumber in creamsicle ice cream)
  • “The Vanilla Bean Trees” (Vanilla bean ice cream and, I’m not sure about the other flavors, but it’d be rich with subtext)
  • “Prodigal Crumber” (Obviously I’m reaching at this point.  Something to do with breadcrumb pudding and cheesecake and marshmallows??)

Any advice on getting past writer’s block?  Kingsolver’s comment here was that she was simply too busy to have writer’s block and, although I don’t remember her elaborating heavily on that point, I can definitely relate to it.  Writing for me is as addictive as exercise.  The more I do of it, the more effortless it is.  That’s one reason I started this blog.  The more I write, the more I think in terms of what I will or might write next and that feeds itself.  When I go for a long period without jogging, I’m irritable and also slower the next time I do go for a run.  When I do it more often, though, the experience is liberating and I’m ultimately more productive.  That’s the best advice I can give to young writers.

5 Things Attendees Don’t (or Shouldn’t) Want at Writers Conferences

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Having just completed Day 1 of my first ever writers conference in Lexington, KY, I can safely say that I have learned enough in 13 hours to make it all feel worthwhile, and by that I really mean worth my $125.  Yeesh.  It’s a good thing these gatherings aren’t once a month.  I had a wonderful experience speaking to Miss Janet Reid about my query letters, I met some wonderful writers with different platforms, and I heard some wonderfully blunt honesty from an industry pro, Mr. Chuck Sambuchino.  That said, I think we writers have earned the right to voice a few things we don’t (or shouldn’t) want at these conferences, given the time that we invest and money we, well, also invest.  Ka-ching!

1.  A Worthless Keynote Address:  This point bubbled all the way home in my head as I walked down Broadway in Lexington, KY, returning from a keynote address by the lovely Barbara Kingsolver.  It was an utter waste of time and money.  Are you indoors?  Look up.  See the ceiling?  Beyond that were my expectations.  Look down.  Do you have a floor?  Grab a shovel.  Don’t get me wrong.  The Poisonwood Bible made me decide to take my writing seriously.  It changed my world view.  Kingsolver is rightfully a Kentucky treasure and seems like a wonderful person.

Is she gone?  Okay, let’s start trashing her address.

I’m always skeptical when I hear that an author at a writer’s conference is going to be “reading from an upcoming book”, because it tells me that said author is really just appearing to lend the conference some pro cred and isn’t intended to actually be helpful.  I knew Kingsolver was going to be reading from her new book—I’m sure it’s another masterpiece—but I also heard she was going to discuss the process and where her originality comes from.  Unfortunately, I never got there.  I bailed 40 minutes into her address from sheer boredom and disillusionment.

The address started with about ten minutes of her giving us background information we either already knew or could have looked up on Wikipedia.  It then digressed into another ten minutes of useless exposition about Kentucky when every single person in the room, I believe, was from Kentucky.  We perhaps could have used some insight into her time in Arizona, but for crying out loud, she didn’t have to spend five minutes remarking on the strange little names of towns in our backyard!  I’m from BAGDAD!  My mother is from BALD KNOB!  I’ve heard them all!

I know that’s a lot of exclamation points, folks, bear with me…I’m not trying to be disrespectful.  She really did seem like a charming person, with Tina Fey’s voice and cute in a kind of “First Wives Club” Diane Keaton by way of Helen Mirren kind of way.  My point is that I came for the good stuff.  I came for the insight and knowledge of someone who has been called one of the most important writers of our generation and who is indisputably one of the most important writers to me.  Instead, I got a snoozable history lesson followed by five minutes of lame jokes (the audience ate it up, though) and what felt like an eternity of Kingsolver reading her own poetry.

Change Daniel Day Lewis to Nicolas Cage and “There Will Be Blood” to “Face/Off”, though, and I’m on board all the way.

I’m sorry, but that’s just phoning it in.  If I wanted to hear her poetry, I can find it on my own.  I like to think we want real, candid advice.  It would be like attending an acting class with Daniel Day Lewis and just having him play a couple of short snippets from “There Will Be Blood”.  Who knows, maybe she completely turned it around after I left, but her address simply left me wanting something worthy of her reputation.

UPDATE:  Miss Kingsolver has a chance to redeem herself!  I have discovered she will be speaking to us in a less formal session in the morning.  I’ll chalk that up to exhaustion.  The keynote address was still worthless self-promotion but at least I should get to hear her genuine input on Saturday.  Hopefully she’ll deliver and I will have nothing bu rave things to say about one of my favorite writers!

2.  The Basics – Another grievance I had with the conference was all the time wasted on walking people through the basics.  Now, I know people of all learning curves and writing levels attend these things and I don’t want to slight their efforts or needs, but they should have isolated an entire breakout session to people who were just starting out instead of wasting half of all the other sessions starting on the bottom floor.  In one session, I kid you not, I had a speaker spend twenty minutes explaining structure to us by using actual bricks that he could have found in the parking lot for all I knew.  His audience?  Myself and about a dozen retirees.  I’ve purchased scores of books on plot building, structure, narrative, etc.; I’m a little beyond the brick metaphor phase.

Now, I realize I’m the jerk who is saying “I’m too good for that stuff” and, well…I don’t really have a comeback for that.  I guess I am being a jerk.  Obviously the basics are important, but that’s why we have books on them!  That’s why we have the drafting process and editors and feedback and criticism…So that we can get past the basics.  Hearing what I considered to be obvious retreads, to me, felt like showing up at an NBA team’s tryouts and saying, “I’m here.  Teach me how to play basketball.”

3.  Flattery:  At this point, I’ll also mention that the night before this conference, I stayed out late in Louisville watching the Red Hot Chili Peppers live in concert, so I was a weeee bit tired come morning.  Accordingly, if my demeanor comes off as grouchy, I assure you that’s all it is.  I’m not really this conceited.  I’m speaking more in hyperbole than anything else.  However, the one thing that annoyed me in our breakout sessions was the blind effort by speakers to appease absolutely everyone there.  Every comment was met with a condescending “Oh, how insightful…” from our speakers or “That’s a brilliant idea…” to the point of absurdity.

It was kind of like this in reverse, which somehow made it even more uncomfortable.

The worst case was in one of my workshops where an older professor who looked like Wolf Blitzer started talking about his book and suddenly began describing it with the kind of adoration that I imagine Robert Frost would use to describe an…wait, there might be kids around.  The word I was going to say starts with an “O” and ends in “asm”.  That should be enough for you to solve the puzzle, Blues Clues.  Anyway, I like to think I know enough about the English language by now to tell when someone is just lobbing meaningless words and clichés into the air and shouting “PULL!” before blasting them out of the air with the shotgun of incomprehensibility.  As this man spoke, I swear I saw through time for a moment.  I could hear colors and feel smells.  I saw my life flash before my eyes.  There was not a single logical or cogent thought that escaped his lips and, yet, once he had finished the speaker looked him straight in the eye and said “…That is so true.”

For a moment, I thought I was just being ridiculous and suspected maybe the exhaustion had simply taken its toll at last, but then the woman next to me literally whispered, “WHAT??” and I knew I was not alone.

Let me contrast this with author Chuck Sambuchino, who spoke to us all just after lunch.  I heard several attendees describe him as “a bit of a dick.”  I got that vibe myself, at first.  Then guess what?  He blew us out of the water with what was easily the most blunt, informative, helpful, and HONEST session of the day.  No stroking egos.  No shallow compliments.  He was just raw insight, great observations, brutal honesty, and my pen bled notes.  His bedside manner may not have been much, but at the end of the day, he was like the Dr. House of our writing conference.

4.  Writing Exercises:  Holy sweet moly.  I write enough on my own without attending a conference and having some speaker tell me to write “therapeutically” and answer flippant questions or hypotheticals about my book.  This is clearly a diversion technique for when speakers simply don’t have enough material to fill a block or, frankly, don’t really have anything useful to say at all.  For the first 40 minutes of the block in question, we were forced to answer such gems as “What do you like about your book?” and “What don’t you like about your book?” and “What do you want to do most with your book?”  I’d like for my book to see Paris just once before it dies.  Obviously I could only think of stubborn, sarcastic answers, but I did my best to jump through the hoop.

And all of these establishments will be maintained and operated by George R. R. Martin’s beard.

Then, we got to read our answers to the class, which isn’t really helpful.  It’s like fourth grade show & tell.  I don’t learn anything by hearing that Josephine likes the fact that her book has “humor” or “heart” or that she “hopes to get it published”.  Oh my God, PUBLISHED!  Why didn’t I think of that?!  I just realized that other people can’t access my book when it’s sitting on my laptop!  If only it were placed on some sort of horizontal storage space possibly made of wood where other books like it could be gathered perhaps in a store that specializes, now bear with me here, only in those sorts of things and people, are you still with me, could come to said store and buy them and we would all receive some sort of financial compensation for each sale.

Okay, we have reached the sarcasm threshold for this site.  I’m going to temper it back down.  Thanks for sticking with me, everyone.  You’re a lovely audience.

5.  Stupid Mistakes:  I’m actually going to be quite serious here, briefly.  This incident kind of set the tone for this entire snippy entry.  If you pay money to attend a conference with the intent of seeing a specific agent, MAKE SURE THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF THE CONFERENCE GET YOUR APPOINTMENT CORRECT.  At my conference, two agents were visiting—one in charge of book pitches, the other in charge of reviewing query letters.  I specifically requested the pitching agent, by phone, and heard the woman on the other end repeat it back to me.  When I showed up this morning, they had completely botched everything and I was scheduled to meet with the query letter reviewer.

Oh yeah, that $10 you’re giving me back is TOTALLY worth your incompetence stealing what was to be my first opportunity to pitch a book one-on-one to an agent. We’re EVEN STEVENS!

Don’t get me wrong, I had a wonderful and eye-opening meeting with the query letter professional but it was NOT the meeting I requested and for which I paid.  Double check with your conference and always make sure they have everything right on their end.  Literally, the people in charge of my conference only had one simple task to get right for me and they completely blew it.  I received a partial refund, of course, but that’s not going to put my book on shelves any time soon.

Once again, apologies for the complaints in this email.  I promise I won’t do this very often and I’m laughing about them now.  Feel free to tell me your conference nightmares.  I’m not saying my insights apply to all conferences.  They only reflect the nuisances I encountered in Lexington, KY.  Drop me a comment and let me hear about your experiences.

The 3 Kinds of Writers I Met at My First Conference

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1.  Sharks – You know a shark the moment you see one.  You recognize your own cold, calculating glare in their eyes and you instantly think, “there’s my competition”.  I would consider myself a shark.  Dressed in my blazer and dark purple polo, I had practiced my elevator pitch about a dozen times in the mirror prior to coming.  I had a swagger about me that said, naively, I’m the real deal…even though I haven’t officially published anything.

And what do sharks do?  They go where the fish are swimming and take bites where they can (I assume, anyway…).  Sharks come in a variety of types, of course.  You have the whale sharks, who are super nice and just kind of drift along, chewing an agent or editor’s ear when they can.  You have the vicious hammerheads who butt in whenever they can and dive into a feeding frenzy, usually coming on way too strong in the process.  And then you have your majestic Great Whites who are just simply “the real deal”.  They know where to feed, when to feed, and they end up leaving having sunk their teeth into something truly special.

Okay, I’m really starting to reach on that whole shark metaphor.  What kind of shark am I, you might ask?  I’d say I’m more of a whale shark in transition.  I’m still learning to be ferocious.  Still scraping after flounders when I’d rather have some choice seal.  We’ll get there, but for now, I rarely bite.

2.  Wanderers – This might be the largest group of people you find.  I would also call them the “perpetual pre-novelists”.  This group is always just on the verge of possibly some day getting around to almost writing the second-to-last chapter of that “forthcoming” masterpiece.  Year after year they show up and are approximately 17 words closer to that goal.  They ask questions throughout the workshops and some are applicable but others are completely out of left field.  Case in point, one of our speakers opened up the floor to questions this afternoon, and a woman raised her hand basically just to tell us that she had written 100,000 words—or half of the finished book.  The speaker kind of shook his head and then asked her if she had a question to go with that random statement.

Another wanderer today showed up in frayed-end jean shorts and a black t-shirt wearing an Indiana Jones fedora and had a beard that could have passed for a live badger.  I gathered that he hadn’t bothered to register online for anything, but demanded a meeting with one of the two agents on hand.  Before you ask, no, he didn’t have anything printed out and ready to present or share.

Wanderers are the easiest group to identify as amateurish, but my advice is to never underestimate one.  All it takes is a wanderer finally finishing his or her book and suddenly you’ve got another potential shark in the tank.  And who knows, that shark might be the deadliest one yet.  After all, he or she may have been swimming a whole lot longer than you!

3.  Survivors – If there was one group of people I was completely unprepared to encounter, it had to be the “survivors”.  At my first conference, I would say this group of people accounted for roughly 1/3 of those I met.  Before I say anything else, I just want to say that my heart broke for many of these individuals.  You will see why in a moment.  I assumed this conference would be nothing but sharks and wanderers and, as I started talking to people, I began to slowly realize what was really going on behind the scenes.  It shook me a little.

So many of the people I met—mostly women—were either survivors of cancer, had lost children, or survived some other unspeakable family crisis.  At one point, I went to a breakout session workshop on “writing non-fiction”, which I attended to help hone my upcoming “Naked in Korea” release.  Unfortunately, the so-called workshop rapidly descended into a healing circle with broken women to whom I simply could not relate, being a 26-year-old shark who has only experienced relatively shallow things, evidently.  The experience took me down a peg, which was probably a good thing.  For the next half hour, instead of getting useful feedback on my book, I had to hear about how writing is a “transcendent, spiritual” process and I had to keep from rolling my eyes because I could tell that, for the people around me, this was very helpful advice.  The woman beside me kept telling me how God had chosen her to write her book, not knowing that I’m probably the last person you want to join you down that road.

Nevertheless, I found myself pretty floored by the stories I heard.  The experience put much-needed perspective on what had been The Sean Chandler Show since 8:00 a.m. this morning.  Buy my book!  Buy my book!  Buy my book!  I didn’t mind being dragged back to Earth.

At first, the “survivors” kind of annoyed me.  And that is not meant to short-sell their heroic struggles against pain and adversity.  I empathize with them, I really do.  All I’m saying is that many of their books are only therapeutic and will never be finished because, well, I’m not sure their experiences really have endings in the first place.  I would nod my head and show how sorry I was while they told me about their struggles and of course I would feel something, but I couldn’t understand why they had bothered to come to the conference without anything to pitch.  The conference became counseling and I felt like a shark swimming in a pool of emotion.  It wasn’t helpful, just…enlightening.

Serious authors need to be on the lookout for these sorts of groups.  It’s probably best to avoid workshops full of them, but it’s also necessary to listen to what they have to say.  These people clearly have stories they want to share but most of them will never finish their books, much less find publishers.  Speaking to you might be the closest they ever get to having someone hear their tales.  When dealing with books, one should always be on the lookout for a few torn pages.