San Francisco Writers Conference 2024
Welcome to the March issue of Hacker Chronicles!
Just a couple of weeks ago I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference and I decided to share my highlights here with you.
Don't forget to check out the Hacker Fiction merchandise store.
Enjoy!
/John
Writing Update
Draft 1 of Submerged has been sent to my alpha readers, my development editor in Los Angeles, and a new development editor up in Washington. For me it's a time of waiting and anticipating. Other humans are for the first time reading a new story I wrote.
I'll get their feedback in a few weeks and will then synthesize the big picture out of it before I start a revision round.
This is where Draft 1 ended up, word count-wise:
I chose Kristin Price as voice actor for the audiobook version of Identified. Thanks to everyone who voted! The deadline for that project is mid-April so I should be able to get the audiobook out in spring. It'll be interesting to see how many hoops I have to jump through to get it onto streaming services like Spotify and Storytel. Audible and Apple Books looks to be easy since they're integrated into the ACX service I used to get the auditions.
After discussing with some book award folks at the SF Writers Conference, I will very likely target January 2025 for the official release of Submerged. I may do a limited Binary Release during the 2024 holiday season.
March Feature: San Francisco Writers Conference 2024
The San Francisco Writers Conference is an annual event with seminars and panels on fiction writing (both books and movies) and nonfiction writing. They also have a bunch of literary agents on site whom you can pitch to.
I first attended in 2018 and then again 2019. I was registered for 2020 but Covid hit and the conference was cancelled. This year is when I returned and it was so refreshing.
Who Goes To These Conferences?
I estimate that 80% of the attendees are women, the median age is 50 years, and the age range is high school students to at least 70.
Most attendees I talked to are either not published yet or self-published. Memoirs seemed to be really popular this year. Back in 2018-2019 I heard much more buzz around fantasy, especially Harry Potter-like stories. Now I heard more about portraying real life, such as sauna bathing in Finland or regaining your confidence as a newly-divorced.
The great majority of speakers are women too.
Sensory Writing, with Alka Joshi
Joshi's session was about incorporating senses like touch, smell, taste, and hearing in descriptions. So much writing is visual but there's tremendous power in describing other sensory input.
Alka Joshi is a bestselling author who was also one of the keynote speakers (see below). She read aloud from her own novels and explained how she uses sensory writing.
An interesting thing she mentioned was that you can use smell to convey a memory or a feeling from the past.
Writing Satisfying Scenes, with Julia Vee
Julia Vee writes fantasy with magic, monsters, and dragons.
Good scenes have a value shift at the end, such as Ignorance –> Wisdom or Loneliness –> Companionship.
The value shift happens through conflict or revelation. If humans are not in conflict and there is nothing new revealed, the scene can be cut because it's not moving the story forward.
For conflict to happen there needs to be human relationships. Not necessarily good ones, quite the opposite in fact.
Triangular or even more complex relationships are better than one-to-ones. Julia gave the example of Star Wars where the protagonist Luke Skywalker has his sister Princess Leia, his father Darth Vader (also Leia's father), his father’s best friend (Obi-Wan), and the trainer of him, his father and his father’s best friend (Yoda).
A comprehensive study of best sellers shows they all have 50-60 scenes.
What You Need to Know to Polish and Sell Mysteries and Thrillers in 2024, with Cara Black, Tanya Egan Gibson, and Lynnette Novak
I love these kind of down-to-earth panels with established authors and agents who say it like it is. Here's what they had to say about the two genres thriller and mystery.
Lynette Novak:
- Don't trick the reader, they should be able to figure it out if they pay attention.
- A thriller needs to be fast-paced and about survival.
- There should be no coincidences in your plot.
- There should be no convenient clues either.
Tanya Egan Gibson:
- The breadcrumbs should be there from the start, not from the middle.
- The protagonist needs a skill or ability that is crucial for the resolution.
- Write more action and less inner thoughts.
- Remember that your reader wants to go places – move your characters around.
Cara Black:
- Ask yourself, what are you afraid of? Then write about that.
- What is the worst thing that can happen to your main character? Escalate from there. The problems need to mount.
- What would make you cross the line? What would make you commit a crime? That's your villain's background or reason for being evil.
Several of their points were known to me, but still good to hear. Never underestimate the importance of confirmation. Being creative can be riddled with doubt and lack of confidence. Hearing other successful people do it similar to how you do it is empowering.
Keynote Speaker 1: Alka Joshi
Alka Joshi's keynote told the story of how she wanted to write what could have happened to her mother if she hadn't been part of an arranged marriage at the age of 18 and hadn't given birth to five kids in four years.
Alka grew up in Jaipur in India and came to the US at the age of nine. She largely buried her origin as so many young people do who find themselves in a new culture where they want to belong.
Forty years later she was traveling back and forth to Jaipur with her aging mom who wanted to go there as much as possible, reconnecting to her old life. That's when Alka started envisioning how her mom's life could have been.
It took Alka ten years and around twenty revisions to get her debut novel The Henna Artist out. During that time she gave up multiple times and lost and found faith over and over.
I choked up when she said her mom passed away before the book ultimately came out.
The Henna Artist became a huge success and was followed by The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris.
Keynote Speaker 2: Maia Kobabe
(Maia Kobabe's pronouns are e/eir, just so you can follow the below.)
This keynote was very emotional for us in the audience. Maia Kobabe has ended up in a political whirlwind in the US because e wrote what became the country's most challenged/banned book, Gender Queer: A memoir.
We got to hear eir story as a fledgling illustrator and comics writer who absolutely didn't want to write about being queer. But after some friends convinced Maia to publish eir private, single panel comics on queerness on social media, it turned out they resonated with lots of people and e got a significant following. Those panels eventually became Gender Queer: A memoir.
Being singled out as some kind of villain in the American culture wars has of course been extremely stressful and downright dangerous.
I bought Gender Queer: A memoir, got it signed, and got a wefie with Maia:
Remarks
A writers conference is of course nerdy. You're surrounded by people who share a very specific interest and every conversation at coffee or meal breaks starts with "So, what do you write?"
Sometimes when I read modern literature I wonder how many authors do it as thoroughly as it's explained in these kind of sessions? How many work hard on their sensory writing, make sure there's a value shift at the end of each scene, and take the time to incorporate the necessary beats of their genre?
I am personally of the mind that these things matter. Not as rules but as rules of thumb. And when I find a modern novel kind of meh, I think it's often due to the author not investing in and perfecting their craft.
I go to San Francisco Writers Conference to listen to how others do it and reflect on how I can improve. I know I have the stories I want to tell. It's about telling them in a great way and satisfying readers. There's no doubt in my mind that that is hard and you have to spend years learning it.
Currently Reading
I've picked up reading Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence again. But it's soon time for a novel.
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