News & Events

To continue yesterday’s report on classes at the 10^th annual LDStorymakers Conference, I attended two good classes regarding the industry. In the class on small vs. Big 6 publishers, taught by bestselling authors James Dashner and J. Scott Savage, we learned that the often-feared phrase “right of first refusal” that is in nearly all contracts regarding future books the author will write, is not all bad. You don’t have to accept the deal they offer you on future books, if you don’t want to be tied to that publisher. However, it is always a good idea to have an attorney go over your contract before you sign, to be sure what you are getting into.

Big 6 publishers have much more capability in their editing departments. All authors, no matter how experienced and successful they are, will receive many pages of edits and revisions to work on. And with much bigger promotion budgets, big publishers can do a lot more advertising for you. That doesn’t mean they will, just that they can if they so decide. Still, though, word-of-mouth is the very best advertising you can get, no matter who your publisher is. So yeah, that’s why you learn, practice, and work hard, so you can be the best you can be and earn that word-of-mouth advertising. And the presenters assured us, you can expect to be able to quit your day job, if that’s what you want, but it will take a long time, and you do not quit until you have to.

Silver Pages to Silver Screen was taught by Bob Conder, who has over 30 years in the film industry. According to him, here’s what you need to make your book appealing to Hollywood: A great logline, great title, great characters, great dialogue, great concept, and a three-act structure. Every story should end where it begins (in situation, not necessarily location). Write visually because remember, movies are visual. You want the gatekeepers to be able to visualize it on the big screen. And here’s a good one I’ve always believed in—write for yourself first. If your heart is fully into the project, that’s going to show on the page.

Thanks, LDStorymakers, for a good conference. I look forward to next year.

I had an amazing time attending the 10^th annual LDStorymakers Conference this year, wandering around amongst fellow writers, talking shop talk, and attending very well-put-together classes. And the icing on the cake was when I got The Maze Runner author James Dashner’s autograph for my son, who happens to be reading that book right now and was pretty thrilled to get that.

Here’s a summary of the classes I attended. In this post, I will cover the ones having to do with the writer’s craft. In my next post I’ll address the book industry classes I attended.

First was Scene & Sequel where we learned about reader contracts. That’s the contract we have with our readers to deliver what they are expecting from us. We dissected the parts which make up scenes, i.e., the goal, the conflict, and the disaster (which isn’t necessarily as violent as it sounds. It’s just the thing that goes wrong so that the main character in the scene doesn’t meet his goal.) Then we learned about the parts of the sequels. (The term ‘sequel’ confused me at first. The name I learned these by is ‘interludes’.) Whatever you prefer to call them, the parts are: the reaction (of the character to the disaster just experienced in the previous scene), thought, decision, and action, which leads the character into the next scene.

The teacher talked about the pacing of novels being affected by the genre and the target audience, and how sometimes those scene and sequel parts can get put into a different order. Good information, but I couldn’t help but think we were splitting hairs a bit. Based on the examples given, I wondered if we were fitting the books to the plan or the plan to the books. My take is, get all the training and practice you can, then trust your subconscious. It knows what it’s doing! Indeed, one thing I heard repeated in several classes was breaking the rules can be a good thing, as long as you learn the rules first so you know how to break them properly.

In Loud & Clear: Finding Your Voice, we learned that there are three things publishers look at: voice, writing, and plot, and depending on which genre you’re writing in, any one of those can come to the forefront. Some elements that make up your unique writing voice include character, the narrator, point of view, monologue & dialogue, and description.

In Coloring Outside the Lines (basically a class about the aforementioned rule-breaking), we talked about genre bending. One thing that stood out to me was the advice that, if someone is shopping in a particular section of the bookstore that is their favorite, and they find your book in it and buy it, would they be disappointed because it wasn’t really the kind of book they usually buy?

In the Point of View class, we discussed that, it isn’t just a matter of deciding between first and third person point of view. In third person alone, there are many options, omniscient, multiple, distant, and close, with close being pretty interchangeable with first person as far as how deeply you penetrate the character’s mind. Great stuff there!

More coming tomorrow.