the muse & the marketplace 2010
session 5
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010, from 11:15am to 12:30pm
SESSION 5A: “Nothing Happened, or Where's the Plot?”
Description: Contemporary literature is praised for a number of wonderful characteristics: depth of character, profound insight, and a thrilling use of language. But one thing you don't hear to often is, "Damn, it had a good plot!" For some writers this is by design, issues of narrative or forward momentum are beside the point. But for the rest of us there may actually be a simpler reason for the lack: we just don't know how to do it. Our talk will focus on this mysterious creature called plot. How does one recognize it? How does one incorporate it? I won't be listing a bunch of tricks or shortcuts for inserting narrative into your work, instead I'll use some examples to show you how a writer learns to identify the narrative, or lack thereof, in their own work. And once that's done, how you might try to fix the problem.Type: Lecture with Q&A and Discussion
Author: Victor Lavalle. Victor LaValle is the author of slapboxing with jesus, a collection of stories, and two novels, The Ecstatic and Big Machine. Among his awards and fellowships are a Whiting Writers' Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, and the key to Southeast Queens.
SESSION 5B: “Rules of Engaging the Young Adult Audience”
Description: In this session, Regina Brooks, literary agent and author of Writing Great Books for Young Adults, will discuss a few rules to help writers capture the young adult audience. She will also familiarize participants with the YA and middle grade submission process, the do’s and don’ts. Participants will find out what’s selling and what’s not as well as strategies for improving your chances of acquiring and agent/editor for your manuscript.Type: Lecture with Q&A
Author: Regina Brooks. Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her agency has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature, including: three-time National Book Award finalist, the Coretta Scott King Honor, and the 2006 Michael Printz Honor Award-winning author Marilyn Nelson; winner of the 2008 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award, Sundee Frazier; Nina Jablonski; and Marjorie Greenfield (The Working Women’s Pregnancy Book). Brooks also has a talent for identifying new voices and potential authors like Derrick Barnes, whose first novel, The Making of Dr Truelove, won an American Library Association Award. Serendipity was hailed by Writer's Digest magazine as one of the top 25 literary agencies in 2004. Prior to opening her own agency, Ms Brooks held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons (where she was not only the youngest but also the first African-American editor in their college division) and McGraw-Hill. She is the author of the children's book, Never Finished! Never Done! (Scholastic, 2004) and Writing Great Books for Young Adults (Source Books 09). Brooks is also on the faculty of the Harvard University publishing program. Her recent sales include: In the Black: Retirement Planning Guide for African Americans (Harper Collins), Handle Your Entertainment Business (Hachette); Wishing: How to Fulfill Your Dream (Beyond Words/Atria), Girligami (Watson Guptil), Beautiful Ballerina (Scholastic), Imperfections (Clarion), and Sweethearts Of Rhythm (Random House). She is a regular speaker at writer’s conferences and is interested in new and emerging writers. www.serendipitylit.comSESSION 5C: “The Ten Elements of a Great Thriller”
Description: Alfred Hitchcock once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” A satisfying thriller, in other words, gives the reader far more than mere surprise. We also need reversals, a sense of progress, a series of well-timed twists. We want characters that we care about, a villain that we believe in. We want an opening that grabs us by the collar, an appealing narrative voice, and an ending that’s satisfying and elegant. All good novels are, in a sense, suspense novels; whether you’re writing “literature” or mystery, fantasy or horror, you’ll want to master the basic suspense techniques that keep readers turning the pages.Type: Lecture with Q&A and Discussion
Author: Joseph Finder. Joseph Finder, internationally bestselling author of nine novels, launched the Nick Heller series with the publication of Vanished in 2009. The second book in that series, Buried Secrets, is due for release by St. Martin’s Press in August 2010. The Daily Mail called Nick Heller, a high-level corporate security consultant, “an adaptable, compassionate and satisfying maverick hero.” Previous bestsellers include Power Play, which debuted at #7 on the New York Times list; Killer Instinct, which won the ITW’s Thriller Award for Best Novel of 2006; Company Man; and Paranoia, now in development as a major motion picture and named as a “Best Business Book of 2009” in a poll conducted by the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Finder’s 1998 novel High Crimes became a hit movie starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Finder did graduate work at the Harvard Russian Research Center. He lives in Boston with his wife, their teenage daughter, and a neurotic golden retriever, Mia, a dropout from seeing-eye dog school.
SESSION 5D: Marketplace Lecture: “Secrets of Being Your Own Book Publicist”
Description: Writing your book is only half the battle. The other half is promoting your work—something most authors treat as an afterthought. Just as a company has not only R&D department but also Sales and Marketing, a successful book launch must involve a coordinated marketing campaign on the part of the author. Using her own The Fortune Cookie Chronicles as a case study, Jenny will walk through the publicity strategy that took her onto The Colbert Report, The Martha Stewart Show, The Today Show, CNN, and NPR stations coast-to-coast. She’ll also teach you how to use a blog as a living marketing document, how to use of Facebook and Twitter to promote events and generate sales, and how to earn speaking engagements at venues such as the Library of Congress. Applying what she learned from Cary Goldstein, one of the top book publicists in the industry, Jenny has now given over 100 book talks since her book launched and done dozens of media interviews and media appearances. This session is specifically about the marketing and promotion of non-fiction, though fiction writers may also find it useful.Type: Lecture with Q&A
Author: Jennifer 8. Lee. Jennifer 8. Lee is the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, a book on Chinese food in America that hit #26 on The New York Times best seller list. She worked for nine years as a reporter at The New York Times, where she still helps out on social media. She is the lead judge in the Knight News Challenge, which gives away $5 million to news innovation every year. In addition, she is co-chair of the Asian American Writers Workshop’s board of directors, a former member of the Poynter Institute’s National Advisory Board, and a judge in the Robert F. Kennedy courage in journalism awards. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in applied math and economics.SESSION 5E: "Know What I’m Saying? Exploring the Possibilities of Dialogue"
Description: Writing dialogue is a little like spinning plates. We must advance the plot, introduce information, and illuminate characters through conversation. Meanwhile, we must ask ourselves with every line, “Would this character actually say that?” Luckily, we are given plenty of tools to let us listen in and step back—to witness not only one character says, but what the others hear. Edith Wharton’s short story “Xingu” is a battle royal of dialogue. We will examine her techniques of exploring the gaps between what is said by the speaker, heard by the listener, and understood by the reader. After a short exercise, we will compare Wharton’s techniques with those of a few other writers, and our own. “Xingu” can be read for free online at www.classicreader.com.Type: Lecture with Q&A, Discussion and Guided Writing
Author: Vestal McIntyre. Vestal McIntyre was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, and has lived in Boston, New York, and, currently, London. He is the author of the story collection You Are Not the One, which won a 2006 Lambda Literary Award, and the novel Lake Overturn, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Best Book of 2009, and is the winner of the 2010 Grub Street Book Prize in Fiction. His stories have appeared in Open City, Tin House and Boston Review; and he has received fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. ***SOLD OUT*** SESSION 5F: “Go There: The Art of Conflict in Fiction”
Description: All too often, students shy away from the juiciest, most meaningful moments in their stories because they aren’t sure how to write the conflict, or they’re afraid of writing it. That conflict can be anything from a brawl to a conversation, internal or external. In this craft class, students will look at a couple of stories to examine the meat of fictional conflict, how authors work with it and how they might begin to use conflict more skillfully in their own work. Then we’ll practice writing a conflict of our own. Required reading before the session (provided for you via pdf): Charles Baxter's “Creating a Scene” from The Art of Subtext (Graywolf Press 2008); “Silence and Storytelling” by Alice Mattison (AWP Writer’s Chronicle, February 2009); John Cheever “The 5:48” The Stories of John Cheever; Ernest Hemingway “Hills like White Elephants.”Type: Discussion Class
Author: Martha Southgate. Martha Southgate is the author of three novels, most recently Third Girl from the Left which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her July 2007 essay from the New York Times Book Review, “Writers Like Me” appears in the recent anthology Best African-American Essays 2008. Previous non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She also has essays in the recent anthologies Behind the Bedroom Door and Heavy Rotation: Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. She is working on her next novel, to be published by Algonquin Books. You can visit her website at www.marthasouthgate.com.SESSION 5G: “The Essentials of Style”
Description: What's your style and how do you find it? Figurative language can help. Using examples from fiction, non-fiction and poetry, Ethan Gilsdorf (author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: One Man's Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms) will show you how to beef up your tired or bland prose and avoid cliches with figures of speech (simile, metaphor, personification, etc) as well as injecting attitude (sincere, ironic, humorous, self-effacing) as well as specific techniques like attention to rhythm, sonics, fragments, lists. It's in the service of making your work unique and your words sing. Time permitting, we'll do a quick exercise to get you using what you've learned.Type: Lecture with Q&A, Discussion and Guided Writing
Author: Ethan Gilsdorf. Ethan Gilsdorf is a freelance journalist, poet, critic, editor and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times, Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Improper Bostonian, Gilsdorf also writes on travel, arts and culture for National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, Fodor's travel guides, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and the Christian Science Monitor. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and leads journalism, feature writing, travel writing and creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. His book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms was published by The Lyons Press in September 2009. Read more at www.ethangilsdorf.comSESSION 5H: “Marketplace Panel: Brave New World: Writers in the Digital Age”
Description:Recent innovations in technology and communication have made the written word more portable, accessible, and popular than ever. It is an exciting but challenging time for writers: loud, fast-changing, and filled with both exciting opportunities and dangerous pitfalls. As traditional publishing models dissolve and reformulate, we are at a point of radical restructuring in how written work gets out in the world. This panel of authors and industry professionals discusses the implications of this changing landscape on writers.Level: All
Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab), Jeff Mayersohn (owner, Harvard Bookstore) and author Nick Montfort. Presented by the Boston Book Festival
SESSION 5K: Marketplace Panel: “Literary Idol”
Description: Important: Please read this description carefully before signing up, and bring all necessary materials to the session if you wish to have your work read aloud!In this freewheeling session, a professional actor will perform the first page of YOUR unpublished manuscript for the audience and a panel of three “judges.” The judges are agents and/or editors with years of experience reading unsolicited submissions. When one of the judges hears a line that would make her stop reading, she will raise her hand. The actor will keep reading until a second judge raises his hand. The judges will then discuss WHY they would stop reading, and offer concrete (if subjective) suggestions to the (anonymous) author. If no agent raises his/her hand, the judges will discuss what made the excerpt work so well. All excerpts will be evaluated *anonymously.* Please bring THE FIRST 250 WORDS of your manuscript (fiction or non-fiction only, please) double-spaced, to the session, TITLED, with its genre marked clearly at the top. You will leave it in a box at the front of the room, and the manuscript will be chosen randomly by the actor. (Unfortunately, given the volume of submissions, we can’t guarantee that yours will be read aloud). We do hope and expect this to be a fun event that is respectful of your work and illuminates the process each agent/editor goes through when she receives a new piece of fiction or non-fiction. The point is to thoughtfully evaluate the work at hand, but please be aware that some lines may cause laughter or scorn; in other words, this session is not for the thin-skinned!
Level: Intermediate/Advanced
Leader: Miriam Altshuler, Sorche Fairbank, Katharine Sands and Elisabeth Weed