Russ Viola

Back­space Writ­ers Conference

Let me begin with the most impor­tant take-away you should have from this post.

“If you’ve never been to a writer’s con­fer­ence, and you’d like to meet agents, pub­lish­ers and pub­lished authors in a stress-free ‘no-pitch’ envi­ron­ment, go to Back­space Writ­ers Conference.”

As many of you know, I’m a new writer. I’ve been a long time sto­ry­teller, but have only been putting con­sis­tent word-to-paper for about a year now. After hav­ing com­pleted my first project, “The Secret Life of Stat­ues and urban fan­tasy, com­plete at 75,000 words” I started research­ing how best to approach get­ting pub­lished.
Well, talk about drink­ing from the prover­bial fire-hose! There is so much con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­tory infor­ma­tion out there. Every­one seems to have some opin­ion on how best to approach get­ting pub­lished, and how to become a suc­cess­ful writer. In the end, the research (which is really ongo­ing for me) did serve to do a few use­ful things.
It showed me there is no one way to get pub­lished and that get­ting pub­lished quickly wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily the holy grail. It seemed the very best thing I could do for my career was write and sur­round myself with peers who were doing the same thing.
So I started look­ing for a con­fer­ence I could attend where I could net­work and really expose my projects to peo­ple who were not friends and fam­ily. Peo­ple who wrote in my genre, or even *gasp* Lit­er­ary Agents. The catch I quickly found was that all new writ­ers want to get their work in front of a lit­er­ary agent. Other than blind sub­mis­sions and the dreaded query let­ter (more on what I learned about queries in a later post), the most com­mon way for a new writer to get in front of an agent seemed to be pitch sessions.

I’ve read about these.

I don’t think I like them.

It seems that most lit­er­ary agents don’t like them either. The Back­space Writ­ers Con­fer­ence tries to solve this by for­mat­ting their event into three days of low/no pres­sure work­shops, master-classes and pan­els. Pro-active inter­ac­tion with agents and peers is encour­aged but largely left up to the attendee.

The Agent-Author Sem­i­nar is the first day. I was treated to a cou­ple of agent pan­els on var­i­ous sub­jects, but the meat of the day was the Query let­ter work­shop and the Open­ing Pages work­shop. In these work­shops I sat with a small group of writ­ers, orga­nized by genre, and we read our work out loud to two agents who rep­re­sent our genre. They cri­tiqued each of us, and opened the floor to a short Q&A.
I had never read my work out loud. I know what you’re thinking.

“Russ, if you’d really done your research, you would have found the advice about read­ing your own work out loud!”

You’re right, I did find that advice, I just didn’t lis­ten to it. And sit­ting there in New York, around a table of my fel­low writ­ers, read­ing what I’d poured my heart into for a good many months prior, was a tem­per­ing expe­ri­ence. I said tem­per­ing, because I really feel it made my work stronger. Not only did I get to hear that my project wasn’t ready for prime time yet, but I got to hear why it wasn’t ready. I was able to receive direct cri­tiques from pro­fes­sional agents and peers in my genre, and I’ll be able to sub­mit to them later, when I feel I’m done with my pol­ish­ing.
Through­out the day, the events were spaced apart with inter­vals for social­iz­ing with other writ­ers and meet­ing the agents more directly. This was easy to take advan­tage of. The agents were approach­able and easy to talk to. They wanted to be there. They wanted to help writer’s under­stand what mis­takes to avoid.
I par­tic­u­larly liked the open and direct view into the ‘life of a lit­er­ary agent’ that this con­fer­ence afforded me. The agents in atten­dance get my stand­ing ova­tion for being plain-spoken and hon­est. For their blunt forth­right­ness about what they go through to make their clients successful.

The next two days were a series of Mas­ter Classes and Pan­els, teach­ing or speak­ing on var­i­ous top­ics from ‘Writ­ing the per­fect query let­ter pitch for your novel’ with Kristin Nel­son, to ‘Writ­ing the Break­out Novel’ with Don­ald Maass. As well as ‘You, too, can plot. Really.’ with Gayle Lynds, all of which I attended.
I’ve spent a lot of time in a tech­ni­cal field, and I’ve lis­tened to many pre­sen­ta­tions. Some were given by pas­sion­ate pro­fes­sion­als who loved their work and had got­ten to a point where they wanted to pass a bit of their knowl­edge on. Some were given by bor­ing mon­keys who didn’t want to be there and were just mark­ing time. Please trust me when I tell you that these peo­ple were all com­prised of the for­mer. Mrs. Nel­son, Mrs. Lynds and Mr. Maass were infor­ma­tive and inspir­ing. I took away fac­toids and infor­ma­tion points that I could eas­ily have spent the next year or three fer­ret­ing out of the trash on the inter­net.
That alone was worth the price of admis­sion. To get your work in front of lit­er­ary agents and peers in your indus­try is invalu­able. I also infor­mally pitched an agent and got to sub­mit my first par­tial. So to round out an already way-to-long bun­dle of scrib­bling, please refer to the sec­ond sen­tence of this post.
If you have any ques­tions, please com­ment here or email me. I’d be happy to give you more spe­cific infor­ma­tion.
Warmly,
Russ