Category Archives: The Fictorians

Taken from LTUE’s website: LTUE “is a three day academic symposium on all aspects of Science Fiction and Fantasy. LTUE is comprised of panels, workshops, presentations and papers on writing, art, literature, media, science and other aspects of speculative fiction.”

I attended it the first time several years back and have been a few times. It has changed over time growing from a small student-run symposium for active Brigham Young University students being held in random rooms on campus to taking over the Continuing Ed building to now being held in a nearby hotel. Although it is held in Provo, Utah and run by the Mormon students of BYU, everyone is welcome and it is not religious based.

One time I attended, Richard Hatch, Apollo from the original Battlestar Gallactica, gave a two hour presentation. I was in full Battlestar-loving-geek mode sitting in the front row… six feet from my favorite teenage crush idol. I have to think Richard Hatch is used to the glazed looks and drooling women cause he is as cute as ever!

But I digress. This is a great event. I’ve met authors like David Farland, James Dashner, Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, Larry Correia, James Eric Stone, J. Scott Savage, Lee Allred, Jessica Day George, and Howard Tayler at LTUE.

It’s small enough that you can easily visit with the presenters and panelists. They have readings, panel discussions, presentations, Q&As, workshops and book signings. There are generally three or more activities occurring at any one time and you can literally go from event to event for five to ten hours a day… for three days.

Some stand outs for me over the years have been a workshop on how to create your own language, how costuming affects how we see characters, how accurate do you need to be with facts and history in fiction, how to generate ideas, how to create plot, many aspects of world-building, tips on collaborating, how to create web-comics/comic books/graphic novels, how to do research, writing stellar openings, marketing, editing and revision and too many more to mention.

It is a feast of options, knowledge and networking. People travel to attend this event because it provides so much for the crazy reasonable price of only $30 for three days (and it used to be free).

I do recommend as soon as the schedule is available, highlight the topics you are most passionate about seeing and plan out your day. You have a few minutes to get from talk to talk, but trust me, you’ll want to know in advance where you are going to next. Bring lots of paper or a device for note-taking. In the past, I’ve taken snacks with me so I didn’t have to miss anything by taking a lunch break. They have evening fun like filking and a banquet as well.

If you are anywhere near Utah or can get here February 14-16, 2013, I highly recommend you do. LTUE is worth attending in ways you can’t even imagine.

Anyone else attend LTUE before and want to share?

Dive In! The Water’s Nice

January 2, 2013

Evan Braun

Sounds of the lunch rush washed over me as my heart sank. I fell back into the crinkly leather of my booth seat as the woman across from me reached into her bag and pulled out three full pages of elevator pitches. As for myself, I had travelled halfway across the country with nothing but a few changes of clothes and a mustard stain on my lapel. This is what it felt like to be grossly unprepared.

This was a mere two months ago, hours before the start of World Fantasy Convention 2012. I had arrived early in the morning before the Thursday sessions and was now eagerly catching lunch with a good friend of mine I hadn’t seen in over a year. To my surprise, my friend was more interested in talking shop than catching up on our personal lives. The only reason this surprised me is because we were on different pages. She had come to Toronto to make valuable connections and further her writing career. If I’m being completely honest, I had mostly come to socialize. Like I said: different pages.

And it was me who had to now make a series of furious, last-minute adjustments.

My friend, who’s been writing for many years, has an impressive body of work and a long list of ideas for future works in progress. She’s a big-idea, high-concept thinker… and she had come all this way with books to sell. That wasn’t her mentality; she was as much there to “buy” an agent or editor as anything, and I think that’s a healthy perspective. But however you look at it, WFC is a book market, and she had come with the correct mindset.

WFC is the only major con I’ve attended in the two and a half years since I decided to pursue my writing professionally, but I know for a fact that it’s not unique. Writers go to cons for many reasons, but primary among them is the great white hope of networking: to make that one perfect connection with someone who has the ability to make your wildest publishing dreams come true. WFC 2012 was crawling with those kinds of people. Best-selling authors, agents, and editors from all the major genre publishers were on the premises, and the hardest of hard-nosed genre writers were hunting them like Bugs Bunny at the height of rabbit season.

This wasn’t the fun, laidback reunion with friends I had hoped it would be. In retrospect, it was a hundred times better.

Let me get personal for a minute and explain that I hate networking-or maybe I just hate the word. The idea of walking up to perfect strangers and making small talk, all with the agenda of finding out whether or not they’re useful to me or not… well, it’s fair to say that rubs strongly against my grain. Of course, ardent professional networkers probably wouldn’t describe their skillset quite that way, but it’s the way I have always perceived it. You would therefore expect that a con like WFC was a cesspool of human ugliness from which I would instinctively want to run screaming.

But fortunately, it was too late to do that by the time I sat across from my friend over a burger and fries and that long list of elevator pitches. Thank goodness for that, because WFC was a game-changer for me. And my fervent hope is that one of 2013’s many excellent conventions will be a game-changer for you, too.

In the month of January, you will hear stories from many con- and workshop-goers, our hope being that these experiences and tips will prepare you to take the leap and jump into the professional pool, perhaps for the first time. You’ll learn many things. Like, what’s an elevator pitch? Why is the hotel bar the most important location at a convention? How do you meet other professionals without coming across as desperate and needy? I learned all this and more. Oh, and guess what? I changed my mind about networking. It’s not the dirty word I thought it was.

Welcome to 2013, the year to take big steps. Bold steps. Game-changing steps.

Revise Unto Death or Quit?

December 31, 2012

clancy

Character Clancy Metzger Craft & Skills Rewriting The Writing Life Writing Tools 5 Comments

The last post of 2012. Oh, the pressure!

This makes me think of endings… and beginnings. These ideas fortuitously play into the topic at hand – when should a writer abandon a scene/plot/character/work that just isn’t working rather than rewriting for the fiftieth time?

My story, A Guardian’s Destiny, was a work in process for sixteen months, give or take. I wrote, rewrote, edited, revised, rewrote and on and on for what was longer than was good for me or it. I was halfway through rewrites that added a major character when I couldn’t take it any more. I knew it needed fixed, but I couldn’t figure out what the fix might be. Frustration didn’t begin to cover how I felt. When I stepped back and looked at it with some small measure of objectivity, I could see it had “Edit Face.” Not pretty. So, I put it in a virtual drawer and began something else.

When do you make that call? End one thing, begin another?

That is a personal decision, but here are some things to consider.

Time – How long have you worked on your scene/plot/character/work? Think about Return on Investment or Lost Opportunity Costs. Yes, we want our writing to be its best, but it will never be perfect and we need to recognize the tipping point where we have gone beyond productive effort. If you could have written a multitude of other scenes/plots/characters/works in the time you’ve spent on this particular one, then maybe it’s time to let it go and move on.
Sanity – Is it making you crazy? My story was. That’s not constructive and it’s stressful.
Distance – Sometimes, it isn’t that you need to completely abandon your scene/plot/character/work, it’s that you need some distance from it. Your muse may need time to gel. Time to work out exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. It may be weeks, months, years or never. You just never know.
Perspective – It’s just a story. We’re not curing cancer. Don’t marry your scene/plot/character/work. You need to have some perspective. Sometimes, things just aren’t working and you need to stop. If it helps, save all the drafts or put any deleted text into a different document. Then it isn’t really gone, just not where it isn’t working.

A Guardian’s Destiny has been tucked away for six to ten months. My critique partner asked to read it anyway despite my protestations that it seemed hopeless. After all this time and with her help, I think it may be time to take it back out and finish it. With a second set of eyes and ideas, it may yet be salvageable, but I know now that if it isn’t complete in a reasonable amount of time (not months on end), then back in the drawer it goes.

Here are some sayings that I keep in mind to help me.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind…… John Neal

It’s only a book. If nothing is happening – hit delete and start over. ….. I don’t remember where I heard this, sorry.

When your moment of truth comes, remind yourself: They told me it would be hard. This is what hard feels like. I can do this. ….. Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent

What do y’all think? I’d love more great quotes and/or tales of death, birth and maybe rebirth of your scene/plot/character/work.

And the character ran away with the story (or, my story wandered off track). . .

December 28, 2012

Nancy

Craft & Skills First Drafts Nancy Greene Rewriting The Writing Life 5 Comments

Hey diddle diddle

the cat and the fiddle

the cow jumped over the moon

the little dog laughed to see such a sport and

the dish ran away with the spoon

Okay, it’s all fun and games when the dish runs away with the spoon, but not so much when it’s your character who’s running off with your story. Or at least what you thought was your story.

As a discovery writer, I tend to have my stories overtaken by events. I’ve had a character yell at me that while he could be a cold blooded killer, there was no way he was going to kill that girl for that reason. When he refused, it changed everything. I have to say he was right when I looked at it, but still, what do you do?

Moments like that when my characters talk to me, heck, when they rebel are part of the reason I’m a discovery writer. For the most part, I let them take me for the ride and then see what I ended up with in editing. But sometimes the tangent the characters want to travel down isn’t one they should. Or, as often happens to me, my short story becomes a novella, becomes a novel, becomes a trilogy. Sigh. I’m in the middle of that now with New Bohemia: Just One Night. When I started that story, it was a short that kept interrupting my ability to work on a novel. So, I figured what the heck, I’ll write the short and get it out of my system. That was months ago. At 60,000 words, the story isn’t so short anymore because I decided I needed to kill off my main character’s parents in a way she’s going to feel responsible for the deaths. The story didn’t derail so much as I added a twist to make my characters’ break-up make sense.

As I see it, the trick is knowing when the diversion adds to or deepens the story and when it doesn’t. If in Chapter 12, Rafe is suppose to have a have a fight with the love of his life and the relationship is supposed to look like it’s over, but, instead, if Rafe decides to go hunting with the guys and finds a magic sword that happens to be Excalibur, you might have a problem or, at least, be writing a different story than you thought you were.

If you’re an outliner, you probably know almost immediately when your characters stray and can assess whether in the overall plot arc if the diversion is a complication that should stay or navel gazing that needs to be cut. It’s a bit harder for us discovery writers. After all, we often don’t know where the story is going. (Yes, I acknowledge that this is the way to madness for some.) It could be that the first 100 pages is wrong and not the “diversion”. Been there, done that and it stinks.

So, you have a couple of choices when the characters try to run the show.

1. Go with it. Since the characters are only the writer’s unconscious mind, they might be on to something.

2. Assess the detour and see if it’s a path the story should travel. If not, stop or see #5 below.

3. If it’s a main character mutiny, write it and worry about whether it works in rewrite. This is often what I do.

4. If it’s a minor character, cut, paste and save the “new” story for a sequel or related story.

5. Cut, paste and save in another document, and keep on your plan or outline.

Sometimes when your characters decide to turn left instead of right, you discover wonders. Sometimes it results in the never ending story. The latter isn’t good. You must finish the story. Any story. Every story.

Remember, you need to choose what’s important for your story. If the track your character wanders onto doesn’t advance the story you want to tell, stop, hold a character intervention and get back to the plot line you want. If the path through the forest isn’t well defined, don’t be afraid to leave it and smell the flowers along the way. Just watch out for the big bad wolf, and Hades.