Received great feedback @SCWriters and had the awesome opportunity to pitch to an agent. Still buzzing from everything I learned! #amwriting
— Anastasia Taber (@anastasiataber) October 2, 2015
This past weekend I did a really cool thing and attended the Southern California Writers’ Conference-LA in Irvine, CA – about 60 miles south of me off the 405. The conference took place at the Wyndham Hotel across from the John Wayne Airport in Orange County. The people who put on the conference are hosting their 30th annual conference in San Diego in February 2016, so it’s safe to say the organization has been around for a while and knows what it’s doing. Not to mention that the writers who have attended this conference have earned a combined total of $4 million for first-time authors’ book and screen deals.
At this point, you may be wondering: 1) What’s a writers’ conference? 2) Could it help me? 3) Neither of those things, I just want to know how your meeting with the literary agent went already!
What’s a writer’s conference?
A writers’ conference is usually a weekend (2-4 day) event where aspiring authors come to learn from experienced folk (published authors, editors, agents) on how to improve writing craft and the publishing business. It’s an opportunity to learn from and network with other writers, freelance editors, and agents and also critique a few of your pages. It will exhaust you and afterwards your brain will feel so overloaded with information that it will take a while to process everything. Ideally though once you have, you will discover you have or know where to find the tools necessary to make your book happen.
Could it help me?
Do you have a book idea or have you written a book? Then yes. Do you just like the idea of being a writer but have no ideas or words on page? Probably not. I did talk to some people who were attending who hadn’t written anything, but for most people, spending $400+ on a conference for writing when you don’t write seems like an odd idea. If you have the money and desire, then go for it. But I would suggest reading through “The Artist’s Way” to figure out which direction you want to channel your creative energy before you drop serious cash on a writers’ conference.
Because this writers’ conference was adjacent to LA, there were some people there who had written scripts. I am not sure how helpful the conference was to them; perhaps in the mechanics of storytelling it was helpful but if you want to network, you’re better off attending events in Hollywood. The difference between the two crafts can be night and day and literary agents in Hollywood operate in a very different world from literary agents for books. Sure, both are very interested in selling your book as a movie idea (money!) but in my opinion, that’s where the similarities end.
Now, do you have to attend a writers’ conference to achieve success? No. Plenty of writers have gotten along fine without them, just like plenty of successful authors don’t have MFAs in Creative Writing. But maybe you want feedback from other serious writers, maybe some validation or encouragement, or perhaps you’ve queried agents and are getting form rejection letters and want to know why. There are so many reasons to attend a writers’ conference, many more than I can list. If you’re interested, I would suggest looking for ones that are near you and seeing if anyone has reviewed the conference on their blog (just use Google search). I would also look up the conference schedule along with the confirmed authors and agents who are attending to see if it is worth your time and money.
Gah, finally! How did the agent meeting go?
Very well! Though a lot of things conspired against me. I had fifteen minutes to meet with the agent, which feels like maybe about two seconds when your adrenaline is pumping and your baby is on the line (yes, our novels might as well be an extension of ourselves). The person before me lingered for at least four minutes into my fifteen minutes, the agent’s computer battery had died along with the notes on my novel, and I was asked to pitch when we had been told the only time we would utter words was maybe for a question at the end.
Thank the gods I had attended a pitch workshop the day before, so I had a revised detailed pitch lingering in my mind that I could stutter out in bursts. There were two moments where I thought, “Ack! What was I saying?” Any novice would have descended into full-blown panic, but years of Chinese class had taught me how to circumvent that feeling.
The agent asked me how they travel from planet to planet and I said something like, “Not FTL” (faster-than-light) and, “Kind of like Delta airlines” (?) That might be something I want to return to in my notes. (To be fair, my main character isn’t that interested in the science of it so that’s why I haven’t bothered to hammer out the details. Yeah, that’s an excuse, I know. I’m thinking some travel in between wormholes, Interstellar-style? Science bros, get at me.) I also used Koch Industries to describe my villain but the agent might have thought I was talking about Coco-Cola.
So after obviously delivering the greatest pitch ever in the history of writerkind, the agent told me I had great world building and a great voice, which are the two best things you can hear as a science fiction writer and writer writer respectively. The agent said this based on the first 20 pages I submitted and my query letter (which apparently was very nice – yay, all that eleventh hour research on Writers Digest worked out!) and invited me to submit my full manuscript.
One full second of elation later, sheer panic set in. The agent’s biggest note was to trim my novel down to 90,000 words, and right now it’s sitting at a pretty 110,000. 20,000 words to cut, nbd. (That’s like 80 pages) I talked to some published authors afterwards and they advised editing the novel to near perfection before sending it to the agent; the literary agent world is small so you don’t want to burn through options with a so-so draft.
So bye world, I’ll be working on that. Look out for an update next week on how I’m tightening my plot.
And follow me on Twitter. I will follow you back (unless you look like some kind of Nigerian prince).
