Crowdsourcing!
Writers of my acquaintance! I'm running a writing seminar next year and I need to put the topic/program together; I could use some crowdsourced advice.
If you had the opportunity (at a writing workshop, a con, etc) to hear a panel of successful writers talk about writing, what are the sorts of things you would find most interesting/useful to hear ( Read more... )
Two suggestions based off of this past 4th Street's seminar:
1) Be clear about your intended audience, both in planning and in advertising. Novices? Intermediate writers? What's wonderful for a raw beginner will likely be less rewarding to somebody who's been at this for a while.
2) Try to get a mix of different "types" of writers on the panel: outliners and "pantsers", muse-followers and cold-hard-crafters, analytics and intuitives. All the self-identified writers at this past seminar were much in the same mold, and while they were very nice about it, there was a definite vibe that of course everybody works this way; as someone whose process is very different, I was starting to feel a bit invisible by the end of the session.
As for things I'd like to see:
- A practical workshop on query letters & synopses. Bring what you've got, have it ripped up by people who know what they're doing, re-work it until you've got something that might actually get someone to read your manuscript.
- Something addressing the needs of intermediate writers. There's plenty of resources out there for beginners (pretty much every convention writing panel ever, most online forums, every open-to-the-public writing group I've ever seen), and I hear about a lot of networks for folks who've had their first novel published. But there seems to be a real dearth for the intermediate-level writers, those who've got a handle on the basics but don't yet have that publication street-cred.
- A sort of networking party (ghah, business-speak, but I don't have a better term) for forming critique groups. With some kind of directed info-exchange to help match folks with similar interests, skill levels, and critique needs.
Obviously these are all catering to my specific situation. ;-) But the intermediate writer thing seems to plague a lot of people; at least, I've come across a number of folks feeling similarly lost in the gap.
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