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marydell- I'm not using any reasonable standard for last/first/abbreviated names, just going with what works for me. Apologies if anyone doesn't like being called whatever I'm using.
- I also am not sure who said what for a lot of this panel, because I was in the back and could only see Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and Caroline Stevermer, plus snippets of Pam Dean and Catherine Lundoff if I leaned over and annoyed my neighbors. Eleanor was totally invisible to me no matter what I tried. So rather than guess and be wrong I've attributed several things to "Someone." I'm really sorry about this and will fix it if someone can help me to attribute things properly! For all my other notes I made a point of sitting where I could see people. Also for later notes I was able to identify a few more audience members. But for this particular note set I was still figuring out logistics so it's suckier than the ones that will follow it.
- "Audience" means someone in the audience whose name I don't know.
- Text not in quotes is me paraphrasing; text in quotes is exactly as I heard it.
- Text in brackets is me.
Panelists:
Elizabeth Bear - mod [![[info]](https://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
matociquala]
Emma Bull [
coffeeem]Pamela Dean [
pameladean]Catherine Lundoff [
catherineldf]Caroline Stevermer [
1crowdedhour]
Favorite Quotes:
Elizabeth Bear: "I tried to write a book straight through, and got 60 thousand words in and flamed out like a test pilot over the Mojave desert."
Steven Brust channeling Will Shetterly: “Yeah, this isn’t a bad draft, Steve, but rewrite it in third person, and move it to a different planet, and delete two of the three characters. Other than that, it’s great.”
Caroline Stevermer: Dear friends will tell you how to revise something and you’ll think, “You’re a moron!”
Works & Authors Referenced:
Athyra, Steven Brust
Blood and Iron, Elizabeth Bear
Damiano, R.A. Macavoy
Shadow Unit
Cory Doctorow
Kim Stanley Robinson
-----------------------------------------------------
Eleanor: For me, the first draft is wee, tiny, because I have to actually write the book before I know what it is. With a typewriter. It’s a pseudocode version. It’s like one of those sponge dinosaur things, but you have to put it in water and let it absorb. So the second draft is where it starts to resemble what it’s going to be.
[Someone]: There are different kinds of revisions. There’s the one for getting the sentences right. You can see them, so you can go, oh, that was stupid.
Bull: “This sentence no verb.”
[Someone] The whole job of revision is making it look like you knew it all along.
Bear: Sometimes you did know it all along – you have a note to fix something and you find that in fact you set something up.
Bull: [Speaking of editor’s letters] “That letter you get that says yes, that’s a very nice idea. You understand that nobody but you gets that that was what you were saying.”
[They all discuss writing the denoument first and going backwards from it.]
Bull: Shadow Unit was written in mini scenes, collaboratively – it was like a mosaic being assembled, it was very non-linear and cool.
Eleanor: This panel is turning into “how do you write?”
[Someone]: Are they extricable?
Eleanor: “No, not at all.”
Caroline: [Holds up paper] I have a sample – I don’t know if anybody’s going to be able to see this.
[Someone]: “You could hand it around”
Bull: “You could subcontract a description from one of us.”
Bear: I don’t know that anybody does a formal second draft. I think that’s a lie they teach you in high school.
Bear: Whether you can do things all in one push…it depends on your process. I have to do it with short stories, because “if I am allowed to ponder a short story it will end up becoming a novel.” But I tried to write a book straight through, and got 60 thousand words in and “flamed out like a test pilot over the Mojave desert.”
Caroline: I’m in a writing group and the members all have different processes. One writer hates the first draft but enjoys the second draft. I enjoy the surprises of the first draft so I don’t like second drafts as much.
Dean: “If you’re sufficiently disorganized you can have lots of surprises in rewriting.”
Bull: I ask other writers about the first draft and if they enjoy revising. I really love revising, because the trail has been blazed and “I can do the landscaping” and shinying up, and “I can make it look like I’m a lot smarter than I really am.”
Audience: “You’re sick.”
Bear: “First drafts are terrifying because I never know if I’m going to pull it off.”
Caroline: The perfectionism grows as I reach the last draft. I get through first drafts by saying “I’ll fix it later,” which is frequently a lie. I have stacks of stories that are almost done.
Bear: I really love finishing stuff. If I can get it done and get it out the door and never have to look at that again, that’s good.
[Someone]: Do you enjoy revision because it means you don’t have to let go of the story yet? Or do you enjoy it because it allows you to let it go?
[Someone in the middle]: When I get comments from an editor, I really try to make it what they want it to be. When you have another person trying to make the book what it can be, why wouldn’t you try? But sometimes that same voice says, No.
Bull: When I get a revision letter, my first response is always “Yo Mama.” No matter how much I may really agree with them.
[Someone]: Sometimes they’re just wrong and stupid.
[Someone else]: [agreeing] “It’s not that it didn’t occur to me...”
Bull: Sometimes the problem is that I didn’t put in the part that would tell them that this isn’t something that should be changed. The letter shows I left something out.
[clarentine], to Emma: How do you get from first to second draft?
Bull: I bog down in the middle, and that’s where I have to start tricking myself into moving forward. I don't write the ending first like some people, because that’s what I enjoy. So I hold it to bribe myself to write all the parts in between.
Brust: Will Shetterly is one of the best critics I know in terms of [suggesting large, fundamental revisions]. “Yeah, this isn’t a bad draft, Steve, but rewrite it in third person, and move it to a different planet, and delete two of the three characters. Other than that, it’s great.” I can’t imagine doing that.
Dean: Yes you can! You brought us [the Scribblies] Athyra, with three POV characters. Will said to do everything from Savin’s viewpoint, and you did it. What you said was “I will think about it,” meaning I don’t want to talk about this any more. "But you did it. It was the most horrifying thing!"
Brust: “I’ve blocked it out”
Bear: The work of mine with the most drastic changes was Blood and Iron. It went through extensive revisions. By the time it saw print, it had been through 13 drafts, not counting minor revisions. “I hate that book with a fiery passion.” The agent asked for a major revision: add two POVs. The editor said: add 20 pages of exposition and cut 10,000 words. “It’s like my backwards stepchild who I somehow got through college and now never want to see again”
Bull: "Move out. Send money!"
Caroline: In a writing group, people will often see a problem, and give you terrible advice on how to fix it. But if everyone sees the problem, you know it’s there.
Caroline: If the problem is with facts, I just fix it. In Damiano, by [Macavoy], she has Jesuits in the 14th or 15th century. But they were a counterreformation order. All she had to do was to have it be the Dominicans. So if anyone finds something in my writing that’s wrong, I always fix it.
[Someone]: Writing feels really organic to me. So a major revision is like cutting an arm off and attaching it at the knee.
Dean: Sometimes there’s something that’s just, “no.” But you don’t know what it is until someone gets to it. Will is really good at that, getting to the center of the thing.
Bear: And there are times that you are sure, and you say "No, I’m not putting a dream sequence in the book!" And then seven or eight people send you mail saying it’s their favorite sequence in the book, once you finally cave and put it in.
Bull: "I’m a *bad* writer, I like dream sequences!”
Bear points to Sarah Monette: "Emma, Sarah; Sarah, Emma."
Audience: [some sort of question about feedback and revision]
[Someone]: I am primarily a solitary practitioner. I have beta readers but I’m very careful how early, because if I get feedback at the wrong time it’s easy to have it throw off my process.
Dean: [I think?] There were the Scribblies, and then “some people moved, and then more people moved, and then I didn’t write anything for about 10 years.” So when I got back to it I had one beta reader and didn't do any word counts. I hadn’t written a book for 10 years, so they had a pile of comments that wouldn’t be good things to say.
Bull: Having a writers' group looking at longer work in chapters and in chunks...because the group is seeing the novel, it’s like having another set of heds to keep the novel in. They’re also tracking where I am and what I’ve said.. A lot of times they’ll see a different shape than I do. They’ll say “Ah, yes, you set this up in Chapter Three,” and I say “uh, yeah, I meant to do that!”
[Someone/Audience?]: Do you talk about what you’re writing?
[Someone]: I have to talk about it or it dies.
Catherine: I never used to be able to talk about works in progress. In the last few years I’ve been coming up with capsule descriptions which makes it easier to field questions. Like the current one is “menopausal werewolves” and people go “wow!” and that’s the end of it.
Audience: "Need fresh meat and midol!" [I’m guessing this is Klages]
Caroline: Sometimes you want to protect the story and not talk about it. It’s personal, whether you need to be quiet about a story or a novel, or whether you need to agonize about it in public.
[Someone in the middle]: I love to talk about my work. It’s a great way to throw myself off and not write.
Bear: When I talk about it, “I get all the good stuff out of it, and I don’t have to look at that shocking chasm between what it is and what I want it to be.”
Monette: If I can’t articulate it well yet, and I tell someone, they can say “I don’t think that’s going to work” or “that's stupid”and I’m crushed.
Bull: And you can say all that stuff yourself.
Monette: But if I know the story and I have it worked out, none of that matters. They can say "It won’t work" and I’ll be able to say “Yes, but it does.”
Bull: Lately I've been starting to share unfinished work with people at a stage that’s not what I’m comfortable with. I was having trouble with being able to write at all. So I'm trying to let go of instinct. If I go back to the other habit, I’ll know why I had to.
Caroline: People tell me what to do, and they’re wrong. People tell you how they would fix it. Dear friends will tell you how to revise something and you’ll think, “You’re a moron!”
[Someone]: Will is very good at seeing that a story could go in several different directions.
[Someone Else]: But I know that some paths have been walked. So, "yeah that would be cool but...not my book."
Audience: “But one of the kids should lose an arm.”
Bear: Sarah and I talk in LOLCAT when we’re having an argument. DO NOT WANT.
[Bear says something about mantling and Bull mimes a protective gesture. I think.]
[Discussion turns to Clarion and how it can be bad for your writing]
[Someone]: There are 12 different pairs of eyes looking at your work.
Priscilla Olsen: “And you don’t know where the eyes have been.”
Bear [I think]: Cory had to get hypnotherapy to be able to write again after Clarion.
[Someone else]: Kim Stanley Robinson said he became a less good writer because of Clarion--because it tends to homogenize you.
Caroline: You may have to take it [workshopping with strangers] as an experience that is not related to your writing.
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Date: 2008-07-21 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 08:16 pm (UTC)“and you don’t know where the eyes have been.” That part of the note was audience member Priscilla Olsen.
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Date: 2008-07-22 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 09:21 pm (UTC)Thanks for typing all this up.
P.
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Date: 2008-07-22 02:32 am (UTC)