In June of last year, I attended my first writer’s conference in St. Louis. I was—am still—such a novice. I didn’t know what pitching was, what agents did, how publishing worked, how to engage. And I definitely didn’t know how to take advantage of my resources. But I’d learned a ton, and knew this was the start of something exciting. I knew I’d found my people. So I found my next conference at the UW Madison Writer’s Institute taking place in April of this year.
Through a series of blog posts, I want to highlight my lessons learned and the people I learned them from. I may as well start from the beginning with my first session on Day 1. And I just want to brag that I was totally on time for this one, despite leaving from St Louis that morning. What time did I leave, you ask? In the wee hours. Let’s just say it was dark for a while. I did get through a decent chunk of my audiobook: Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Legacy. Yea, I’m that kind of nerd. Now you know.
It really didn’t feel like too long before I’m sitting in a hotel conference room, listening to an Italian novelist passionately spewing advice to a lower Manhattan beat. His name is Nick Chiarkas, author of mystery thriller Weepers, and his lecture is titled First Draft to a Publishing Contract.
Right off the bat, I’m hit with a game-changing piece of advice: Patience. Don’t be in such a rush. Take your time and work out those mistakes. If your queries aren’t getting anywhere, then find out why. Spend time with your novel with critique groups, really dig in with industry professionals. Just because you’ve done a few revisions doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready for that fateful self-publishing click. Or maybe you’re so anxious to be published that you rush to sign with that cleverly disguised vanity publisher. You don’t want to make mistakes—or get screwed over. If you have the time, use it and have patience.
I needed to hear that. I’d been rearing for what I’d expected to be the next step after finishing our third revision on a project three years in the making. Surely it’s perfect! I do feel ready to query and pitch, to get that experience and feedback. In the meantime—I hear I have years of rejection yet to come—I can take a more critical eye to my novel. Conferences like this can teach me new perspectives to scene structure, characterization, emotion building, and I may find ways to make my book stronger yet.
Nick cleverly works in how his own novel came to be through his advice. He gets a thought from his childhood experiences of growing up in the lower Manhattan projects in the 1950s. And let’s be clear, it’s a thought, not an idea. He educates us on the difference. An idea is basic:
I want to write about jumping out of airplanes.
Your idea isn’t likely to get you far, but if your idea evolves into a thought, then you’re in business:
I want to write about jumping out of airplanes, and then…
He tells us to write like we’re telling someone a story. Grammar and flow and structure be damned. Write down whatever words to not only get the thought out but capture how you feel about that thought. You’re gathering sand, he says. Once you’ve gathered sand, you can build castles.
Once we have our novel, his next words strike home with marksman’s precision:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
It’s so simple. I know Nick is quoting someone, and now that I can Google I see that he had quoted a Roman philosopher. He’s telling us that we make our own luck. BUT, though we can seek out those opportunities, can hope to meet an agent that likes our personality, can hope that agent has the best Big 5 connections, that opportunity means nothing if we’re not prepared. This is where patience comes in. Take your time. Get critiques. Make your novel the best you can.
I will also say that Nick was highly encouraging during my practice pitch a couple of days later on that Saturday morning. I hadn’t planned to do a practice pitch, had figured I could memorize a speech by then. Au contraire. I had ditched my entire speech the night before after hearing too many times to not read off a piece of paper or note card. I had managed to reduce my pitch to keywords, surprising myself with how much of my pitch I could remember just off those keywords. But I greatly needed a guinea pig, someone to tell me if I was totally off base. His face lit up with interest, looking more excited the longer I spoke. He gave me some valuable tips, but even more so, he gave me confidence, and I greatly appreciated it! I realized I could do this. I did my first real pitch ever that afternoon, feeling much less nervous than I think I would have otherwise.
Talk to you soon,
Crystal
Here’s a little bit about Nick Chiarkas’ mystery thriller, Weepers:
The 1957 murder of an undercover cop in a New York City housing project has unexpected ties to the unsolved disappearance of a young father walking home in those same projects with his son, Angelo, on Christmas Eve six years before. The only witness to the cop killing is Angelo, now 13, while on his way to seek his own revenge in the early morning hours. The killers know he saw them. A series of gripping events forge a union between a priest, a Mafia boss, a police detective, and Angelo, a gang member.
Post #1: WI1: Kick off to my post writer’s conference experience
Post #3: WI3: Scene sag leads to the B word featuring RR Campbell, author of sci-fi thriller Imminent Dawn
Post # 4: WI4: Strong Series Potential featuring Silvia Acevedo, author of Greek mythology fantasy God Awful series
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