MileHiCon 30

Never Trust a Con Under 30

Everything I need to know about writing I learned from MileHiCon?

Well, maybe not everything, but there were some amusing things that I learned or heard while I was at MileHiCon.

Judging Books By Their Covers

You don't need words if you've got a straight razor -- this is something Connie Willis said at a panel on horror comics. And it's true enough. It also says a lot about cover art and what that artwork says to the reader. Cover art tends to catch a person's eye and, even though we've all been told not to judge a book by its cover, reel them in to take a closer look. The impact of cover-art on the buying public came up again in another panel where Lawrence Watt-Evans was mentioning how the cover art on the dust-jacket of his book Touched by the Gods was too classical, that it would give the reader the wrong idea about the story inside it. When compared to the same piece of artwork on the paperback, though with the reds more pronounced and copper foil for the title, the effect was striking. The hard cover dust-jacket did look more classical while the paperback cover proof looked more adventurous.

Character-Driven Stories

Character-driven stories seem to be pretty popular these days, but the important thing to remember is this: in a character driven story, the characters have to be driving somewhere. Internal conflict has to be shown externally so the reader has something he or she can see. The importance of a character's internal struggle needs to appear in a way that the reader can relate to and needs to advance the story. If the story is nothing more than a character's self-centered angst, it isn't going to impress many people.

There needs to be a balance between character and story.

Also, saying, "The character told me to..." isn't an excuse to be a bad writer.

Symbols

Symbols don't start out as symbols, they metamorphose throughout the story. If an item is used once, it is a prop. If the writer can use it in other places to cut down on the number of props in use, then the item will become a recurring prop. If these recurring props turn out to have significance behind them, meaning for the character, or the reader, then they become symbols.

Additionally, symbols work best when there aren't many of them. The more symbols, the more information writer and reader both need to keep track of and the more likely a symbol will be lost in the shuffle. If the symbol doesn't really serve a purpose, get rid of it. The same can be said for rooms, scenes, words, and characters. If a purpose isn't served by inclusion of an item, then it doesn't need to be there.

Staging Scenes

Make sure that critical or climactic scenes happen on stage. There is nothing more frustrating for a reader than to get to a chapter break just before a huge battle, and see the start of the next chapter as "After the battle...".

Perhaps the only exception to this rule is for off-stage scenes that can be imagined because it would be similar to something that had happened previously several times. Usually, in these cases, the reader can imagine what will happen as well as, or better than, the author can do it, then leave it to the reader.

Following (and breaking) the Rules

Remember, if you follow all of the rules you've been given while you're trying to write a story, you'll go crazy. Advice is a handy thing for analysis once the story is finished. If you read through your story and it works, great! If it doesn't work, go back and use all of the advice you've heard and through all of the books you've read and figure out why it doesn't.

While "You've got to know the rules before you break them" is often good advice, not knowing about the rules can be good, too. Sometimes, if you don't know that you *can't* do something, you won't think about whether you can or can't; you'll just *do*, and in doing, you'll create something pretty amazing.

Also, a few "You can break the rules if" scenarios:

• You can break the rules, but only if what you do is really really good.
• Breaking the rules is okay, as long as you're getting money for charity.

Short Stories, Novels, Trilogies, Tetrologies, Series and Chronicles

Probably one of the most important things is to know the length of the story you're writing. And then, to write it that length. According to Connie Willis, the only reason to write a novel is that the story is too long to relate as anything shorter.

Additionally, terminology can be confusing if you're writing more than one book in a "series." If it is all the same story, just broken out into several different books, it could be called either "a novel in <X>" volumes, or a trilogy (if X happens to be 3), a chronicle, or a series. The definitions vary from day to day, between editors and publishers, and from writer to writer as well.

Quotes and Other Things

These are the things that just struck me as amusing that I couldn't fit in elsewhere.

On your audience and revisions: You write for yourself, you rewrite for others.

Writing all boils down to sex and money.

Then said *very* shortly after that: There are other reasons to write besides money or instant self-gratification.

Never piss off a writer. (This after discussions of whether or not authors put people they know into their stories.)

The three hard-and-fast rules of writing: You must write. You must finish what you write. You must send away what you finish.

"Everybody has a different method."
"That's what first drafts are for."
"There is no right or wrong way."
-- These were said by Mel Gilden