From a new website called Intelligence Explosion (launched by the Singularity Institute):

Every year, computers surpass human abilities in new ways. Machines can now prove theorems, detect underwater mines, play chess and Jeopardy, and even do original science.

One day, we may design a machine that surpasses human skill at designing artificial intelligences. After that, this machine could improve its own intelligence faster and better than humans can, which would make it even more skilled at improving its own intelligence. This could continue in a positive feedback loop such that the machine quickly becomes vastly more intelligent than the smartest human being on Earth: an ‘intelligence explosion’ resulting in a machine superintelligence.

With great intelligence comes great power. It is not superior strength or perception that led humans to dominate this planet, but superior intelligence. A machine that is more intelligent than all of humanity would have unprecedented powers to reshape reality in pursuit of its goals, whatever they are. 

The site provides both scholarly and popular articles to help explain the intelligence explosion popularly known as the technology singularity.

Stanford’s offering free virtual classes in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Fall of 2011. More than 100K have signed up. This online class

Please vote for my panel on Artificial Intelligence at SXSW: Terminator or Wall-E: Predicting the Rise of AI

The questions we’ll be tackling: When and how will human level artificial intelligence emerge? Will they kill us all like Terminator, or protect the planet like Wall-E? Daniel Wilson, author of Robopocalypse (being filmed by Steven Spielberg) will be on the panel, and the brilliant Chris Robson.

Your votes help decide which of the over 3,000 proposals talks get accepted. Last year you helped my talk on innovation get accepted. Will you please vote again this year?

Thanks,
William Hertling

Here’s how the future robots, er workers, um… citizens of the world will be trained. In the video below, robots are learning how to pick up objects by being fed a continuous series of unfamiliar objects on a conveyer belt. The robot must evaluate different strategies for pick up the objects.

I attended my first writers conference this past weekend: the Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The conference included workshops on the craft of writing, as well as all aspects of a writers career, from using social media and building an online audience to the art of pitching to agents to the pros and cons of self-publishing.

In addition, a major component of the conference is the ability to pitch directly to agents, either one-on-one (10 minute sessions), group sessions (approximately 2 minutes per person), or ad-hoc in hallways or over lunch.

Prior to the conference, I attended a six hour workshop by Leona Grieve on preparing to pitch to agents. This was invaluable, not only because I learned about numerous mistakes I was making on my query letter, but also because it introduced the concept of the log line, a one sentence summary of your concept.

Here’s an example of my log line:

What if a man, desperate to keep his work project from being cancelled, modified the world’s largest email service to automatically and secretly alter people’s emails to ensure the success of the project, only to find that the software’s manipulations continually escalate?

This isn’t a perfect example, as the ideal log line would be less than 25 words, but it’s a start. Many log lines will start with a “what if” but they should also include a “so what”. My first attempts at a log line didn’t include the “only to find that the software’s manipulations continually escalate”. Some intermediate versions cast the “so what” in terms of the impact to the main character.

I also learned that agents like to have a two to three sentence summary of your book in addition to the log line. In addition, you must make sure to mention the title of the book, genre, length (in words), your name, and your credentials.

All this can seem overwhelming, and I spent weeks whittling down what I had to fit the expectations of agents and editors.

I didn’t really understand start to understand the point of it all until the workshop. Agents and editors expect to see something in a particular format with particular content. With anywhere from 25 to 150 queries a day to process, anything outside of the boundaries of their expectations is simply rejected or disregarded. In many ways, this is similar to what happens to resumes: when looking at 50 to 100 resumes for a position, the easy ones to eliminate are the ones with funny formatting or a lack of the expected content in the resume, or the ones without a cover letter.

At the conference I attended a workshop on pitching that included literary agent Laurie McLean, who completed my understanding. Laurie explained that authors pitch to agents, but agents must then turn around and pitch to editors. Editors turn around and pitch to booksellers. Booksellers pitch to readers, who must buy the book. Unless a book has a succinct and compelling description that will ultimately become backcover copy, none of those steps can happen. An agent needs to be able to phone a editor and figure out in a minute if the idea is good. The publisher has to, with only a few words, convey the story and conflict and would it would be interesting to the reader, who will make a purchase decision based on those few words.

Once I really understood how valuable the pitch is all through the lifecycle of a book, some of my internal resistance to creating a pitch evaporated, and I was able to focus on creating an effective one. Once I had it, I practiced over and over, so that I would feel comfortable delivering it.

My completed pitch is 192 words, and it takes me about 1 minute and 15 seconds to deliver at a comfortable pace. Here’s the whole thing:

My book, Avogadro Corp is a 67,000 word techno-thriller. 

What if a man, desperate to keep his work project from being cancelled, modified the world’s largest email service to automatically and secretly alter emails to ensure the success of his project only to find that the software’s manipulations continually increase? 

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization tool, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project may be cancelled, David embeds a directive in the software to filter the company emails for any mention of the project, creating a sense of self-preservation. 

David and his coworkers are thrilled at first when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But his initial excitement turns to fear as David realizes that he too is being manipulated. 

David and his team, and soon the whole company, take ever escalating action to contain ELOPe, including bombing their own data centers, only to find that ELOPE is always one step ahead of them. 

Avogadro Corp was inspired by my work on expert systems and social media at Hewlett-Packard, as well as personal experiences with computer hackers.

It’s still not perfect. In particular, I don’t at all capture how ELOPe plays into world politics, or the subplot of how David and Mike’s friendship is strained by differing opinions about how to deal with the project in the beginning, and in how to deal with the AI near the end.

But it’s shorter and smoother than the 240 word that took me two minutes to deliver, and much shorter than the 350 word body of my query letters that failed to include a log line.

I scheduled two agent group sessions. Unfortunately, there were only three agents interested in science fiction or techno thrillers, and one of them was already booked by the time I registered. I showed up for my first group session both excited and nervous. The agent introduced herself, and then said something along the lines of, “To alleviate some of the pressure and nervousness, I’ll be inviting all of you to send me a query.”

It’s true that it does help if you are nervous, which I was, and it does feel good to get to send your material to the agent. But I can’t help feeling that I would want the agent to be slightly more discriminatory, because I’d like to know that if I am invited to submit that I’d have a better chance than if I had just emailed her agent out of the blue.

Later in the day I went to my second group session, and this agent also again invited everyone at the table to send material to her.

From the agents’ perspective, I think they might say that they can really only make a decision based on the writing itself, rather than a pitch.

In the end, I feel that all the preparation that went into getting ready to pitch at the conference was extremely valuable. I’m not sure yet whether the actual pitching at the conference improves a writer’s chances of success, at least in the format of a group session where there is little time for discussion of the work.

How To Build An Online Audience
Elgé Premeau
Willamette Writers Conference, WWCON11
  • Many source materials located here: http://www.emarketingstrategist.com/WW2011/BOA/
  • The days of “build it and they will come” are over on the internet, even if it ever existed.
  • It’s easy to build an audience when you have one, not so easy when you don’t.
  • Get smart
    • Know who you want to meet.
    • Know where to find them.
    • Know why they should help you.
  • Assumptions & Mindset
    • You have a website/blog or are working on one.
    • You will need to create content
    • You are willing to contact people you don’t know.
      • People like the idea of internet marketing because they want to hide out on their couch and avoid people. But in the beginning especially, you really need to reach out to people on an individual basis.
    • You will dedicate time on a weekly basis to do this. You don’t work out once and get rock-hard abs.
  • Online audience: A group of people who look forward to consuming the media you produce.
    • media is any information that gives them what they want.
    • it always comes back to the written word.
  • Your publisher is going to expect you to at least be a partner in marketing and promoting your book. Agents too look for people with an online audience.
  • When you don’t have an audience, you are essentially talking to yourself or half a dozen of your closest friends.
  • Dialogue is the key to building an online audience.
    • You can do this without ever using Facebook or Twitter.
  • How to do it
    • Step 1: Clearly define who you are trying to reach: readers, agents, industry people, influencers such as bloggers and book reviewers.
    • Step 2: Figure out where the people you are trying to reach hang out online.
    • Step 3: Building relationships with people who have larger audiences than you and are willing to promote or review your book.
    • Step 4: Drive traffic back to your home base: website, blog, social networking accounts, mailing list.
      • Have a variety of ways for visitors to keep up with you, so you can stay in front of them: mailing list, twitter, etc.
  • This is not a linear process.
  • Step 1: who are you trying to reach?
    • Readers
      • Who would like to read your book?
      • What other types of books do they like to read?
      • What other hobbies do they have? (You’re not limited to book only websites.)
    • Agents & Publishers
      • Who do you want to work with?
      • What personality types would you be successful working with?
      • Consider having pages specific to your target markets: Should you maybe have a page targeted specific to literary agents?
    • Influencers
  • Biggest Challenge
    • You can’t connect with people when you don’t know where to find them.
  • Step 2: Find out where the people are online.
    • search : http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=list+of+book+blogs
    • sci-fi blogs: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=list+of+sci-fi+blogs
    • Google alerts
      • set up a search term: e.g. “sci-fi blogs”
      • then select frequency…
    • Blog Directories:
      • Technorati
        • Look for blogs, not posts, to find the blogs that on given topics, because you are looking for influencers on a topic, rather than a one-off post.
    • Search example…
      • searched on technorati for “book reviews”
      • find a site called the book smugglers. they list their review policy.
      • news from blogads book network.
      • click on that, it shows a book ads network
      • the network shows a list of all the blogs they use AND their readership level.
      • a good measure of how engaged blog readers are is how many comments they have on their blog.
        • one blogger has 3,000 comments on her post.
        • lots of good bloggers will easily have 200 to 300 posts.
      • research takes her to http://www.themillions.com
        • he links to websites he likes
    • Start making lists of people and websites
      • categorize them.
        • book lovers
        • book reviewers
        • journalists
        • industry experts
  • In PR, the good people have a big network of connections they can use.
    • now a lot of PR seems to consist just of broadcasting information.
  • Twitter
    • Great resource tool:
    • [note to self: @contextual_life/scifi]
  • iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig
  • Bloggers like it when you comment on their blogs.
  • Bookmark on the web with delicious.com
    • Loved it for years.
    • Yahoo just sold them.
    • A little leery…
  • Friends vs. Fans
    • Professional writers should have a fan page.
    • Don’t friend people from your personal account.
    • Use your fan page to post professional stuff
    • Use your individual page to for family stuff.
  • Infrastructure
    • destination
      • blog
      • website
    • things for them to do
      • sign up mailing list (very powerful)
      • follow you on twitter
      • go to linkedin
    • Youtube
      • second largest search engine after google
  • Quality Content
    • What do you put through the pipes?
    • create content people look forward to
    • invest your time in quality content as opposed to more frequent content
  • Blog post I want to comment on…
    • Sometimes that’s a comment on his website.
    • Sometimes that’s a blog post on my website, and then I post it back on his website.

Creating Plots for Page Turners
Robert Dugoni
New York Times Best-selling Author
Willamette Writers Conference, #WWCON11
  • “I am living proof that you can fail miserably and still make a living as a career.”
  • Writing is technical, and it can be learned.
  • Remove as many obstacles as possible… you want to get rejected on your writing, not on your query letter.
  • You can’t be taught how to write, but you can be taught to teach yourself.
  • You have to get the books, and you have to study them.
  • People will say “just write from your heart”. But that’s not true. It’s like the violin. You can’t hand a violin to someone that doesn’t play and say “play from your heart”.
  • Writers without skill are pouring words onto a page, but they are just words. Not a book.
  • All this applies to memoirs: a memoir has to be a good story. just because it is true isn’t enough. it works for horrors, mysteries, thrillers, non-fiction.
  • As novelists, our primary function is to entertain the reader.
  • The protagonist and the characters are the entertainers, not the writer. The writer should be invisible.
    • You have to let your characters perform. In any of the best authors, you don’t hear the author.
  • When our characters perform, we eliminate:
    • long narratives
    • opinions
      • if you want to write a book about abortion, you gotta let the characters take on the roles.
      • the readers will get offended if you as the author are throwing this stuff about them
    • point of view confusion
    • eliminate distance between the reader and character
    • telling
    • info dumps
      • research
      • technical stuff
      • backstory
      • flashbacks: if you have them, they have to be an actual scene. end the previous scene, start a new scene.
  • Anything that stops a story, especially in the first 50 pages, really needs to be eliminated.
  • Flashbacks:
    • do it the right way
    • don’t stop the story
    • put it in the right place
    • put it in as a scene
    • let the characters continue to entertain
  • What is a story?
    • a journey – a quest.
  • Who is on the journey?
    • the characters
  • The term the journey comes from Joseph Campbell.
  • A journey has movement
    • things happen
    • progress
    • secrets are revealed
    • meet people
  • when you put a character in action, they run into people, they react to circumstances.
  • anytime you have long narratives where a character is sitting and thinking, you have a problem. doesn’t matter what kind of book it is.
    • it’s just never as interesting as seeing the character in action.
    • “i’ll just stand up here and think.” — not interesting.
  • characters don’t need to be traveling. but they do need to be moving.
  • two types of journeys
    • physical journey: your plot.
      • what quest you have asked your character to go on.
      • what steps they need to take to do that.
    • inner journey: journey of the heart.
      • character’s motivation
      • it’s why they are going to do the above.
      • most of the time we’re going to ask our characters to do heroic things. that requires strong motivations to extraordinary things.
  • The Lord of the Rings
    • Why does Frodo take on the quest? Any normal person will say no.
      • the ring can’t just be destroyed in the fire place, it has to go to the worst place possible.
    • He does it for love. The love of the shire, the love of his people, his world.
    • The plot for the Wizard of Oz is identical: dorothy must get something from the witch, the worst place possible.
  • Simplify the motivations.
    • love, fear, anger, ambition, hate, revenge, greed, loss, desire.
    • don’t make it a complex thing that happened somewhere in the past.
    • people will do crazy things for the most basic human motivations.
    • All movies or books about five things
      • to win
      • to stop something from happening 
      • to escape from a bad situation (misery)
      • to retrieve something (indiana jones)
      • to destroy something (lord of the rings)
    • don’t kill yourself trying to create some backstory. work with the basic human emotions.
  • [note to self: get Robert Dugoni books, including Bodily Harm]
  • High concept
    • it means raising the stakes for the individual
    • a policeman has to check out a murder. this is his job. no big deal. he gets there, and wait… it’s his niece.
      • we’ve raised the stakes.
      • if he doesn’t solve it, he may never forgive himself, his family may not forgive.
    • other ways…
      • maybe his wife was strangled 6 years earlier, it reminds him of her.
      • maybe it’s an important senators daughter.
      • a woman he had an affair with.
      • he made some kind of terrible error that led to her death.
      • first big chance, last big case.
    • you can raise the stakes without making it artificial.
  • we don’t need to flashback in the scene.
    • he goes to the crime. he sees the face. OMG. end scene. Next scene: “six years earlier…”
    • OR
    • he goes to the crime. his partner says “I don’t think you should take this. She looks like Mary.” “It’s been six years, I can handle it.” “I don’t know if you can.”
  • Good beginning: first 50-75 pages.
    • Establish the tone of your book
      • the reader should be able to pick it up.
    • Introduce your protagonist
      • You want the reader to become grounded in a person.
      • As he’s become a better writer, he has jumped around less
      • Be able to answer:
        • who is your p.
        • what is your p.
        • where is your p.
        • what does your p. want?
        • what stands in the way of them achieving it?
    • Introduce your setting
      • Ground the reader in where the story is taking place.
    • Creating Empathy
      • Make your character empathic, not pathetic.
      • undeserved misfortune…
        • someone took their son
        • someone has taken something from them
      • put your character in jeopardy
        • tom cruise in rain man: total jackass.
          • but in the beginning of the movie, he’s losing his business, he’s undergoing financial collapse
        • someone trying to kill them
        • emotional jeopardy: “i am divorcing you, and I am taking the kids”
      • make them a nice guy.
        • he saw the cat eating out of the dumpster, and put out a bowl of food. the cat came back the next day. soon it was his cat. what a nice guy.
      • make them funny. we like funny people. they say all the things we wish we could say but don’t.
      • make them powerful.
    • Hooking the reader
      • opening sentence should raise a question.
        • “the camel died at noon.”
          • it raises questions. what camel? why did it die?
        • “father so-and-so put down his hoe and looked at the naked man coming out of the forest.
      • give them a question and hook them, and then give them an interesting person.
      • someone interesting should appear right away.
    • The Middle of the Book
      • develop the implicit promise.
        • we expect something to be happening…
          • a murder investigation to investigate the murder
          • romance to fulfill longing, etc.
      • we should really know exactly who this is about and what their quest is.
    • There is a thru-line in every book
      • examples
        • thrillers: will the bad guys be brought to justice and how?
        • mystery: who did it?
        • winning: will sea biscuit race war admiral and win?
      • But if all we wanted to know is the answer, we would skip to the end.
      • We read for the obstacles in their path, all along the way.
    • Dorothy and Wizard of Oz:
      • obstacle: which way to go?
        • introduce the scarecrow. 
        • she’s compassionate to him
      • obstacle: she’s hungry
        • there’s an apple, but she can’t get it.
        • the scarecrow helps her.
    • The obstacles should build toward the climax, 2/3rds of the way through the book
      • the obstacles should reveal who the character is
      • harry potter:
        • he’s courageous, loyal, sympathetic, etc.
        • all the obstacles reveal this about harry.
        • it’s how he always wins
      • If all the obstacles are the same, it becomes monotonous.
      • the biggest obstacle is the climax.
  • The End
    • The murder should be solved.
    • The romance should have a happy ending.
    • Satisfy the reader.
      • If you cheat the reader, they feel unsatisfied. If you don’t bring the bad guys to justice.
    • But you can have some twists.
      • How many times did that boy say “i see dead people.”
      • Murder One has two big twists in it.
    • No sudden new character.
    • In the end, the actor has to be the protagonist.
      • It has to be Harry who kills Voldemort.
    • No new forces or skills.
      • You can’t just add something because you painted yourself into a corner.
  • Does your character achieve his or her goal?
  • What final obstacle returns to her path to return to the ordinary world?
  • How does it demonstrate how your character has changed?
  • epiloque
    • close up loose ends
    • don’t ever neglect an animal. you can kill thousands of people, but don’t ever neglect an animal. readers will call you and say “you left a cat and dog in a kennel.”
  • Books
    • Saltine’s “On Writing”
    • Writing Genre Fiction – Milhorn. very good.

Say What? Mixing Spoken and Internal Dialogue
Hallie Ephron
Willamette Writers Conference
WWCON11
  • Strong opinions, but you should never take what any one person says as gospel.
    • There are as many ways to write as there are authors
  • Please just just use “said” and “asked”. Reuse them. They are invisible to the reader. Don’t be creative.
  • “Matt”, she said, careful eyes on me, “is eighteen now.”
    • By putting the “careful eyes on me” where it is, it sets up the reader for what follows. It casts a shadow on the dialogue that follows.
    • “careful eyes on me” is the narrator giving information without telling, and gives us insight into the feelings of a character other than the point of view character.
  • em dash vs. ellipsis: em dash is changing the characters thought. the ellipsis is a pause in the characters speech, or trailed off if at the end of dialogue. If there’s an em dash at the end of dialogue, it means something that happened before the dialogue was finished.
    • Then you don’t have to say “he interrupted”, because the em dash told the reader.
  • Usually in a scene it is fun to be in the head of the character who is more off balance.
  • Don’t get in the head of a character who is not a main character.
  • Don’t use cliches like “she threw her hair back”, “her green eye flashed”.
  • Don’t bounce around in people’s heads. Some successful authors get away with it. But not first time writers. And while non-critical readers may not notice it, agents and editors and reviewers will.
  • Avoid redundancy, don’t explain
    • “I hate you,” I said. I was furious.
      • Show, don’t tell.
      • Don’t tell me twice the same thing.
    • “I hate you.” I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone.
      • Now we are excusing something different: she doesn’t hate him, she just said that.
  • Tags other than said and asked:
    • Dialogue
      • “Are you going to go home?”
      • I didn’t answer
      • “Are you going to go home?” she persisted.
    • Don’t do it. it’s redundant.
  • No adverbs with the word said.
    • Adverbs hung on words are tells.
  • Avoid “she saw”, “he saw”. It’s assumed. It distances the reader.
  • Sighing, shrugging, shaking your head. Characters do it, but it’s not the most interesting thing to read, so don’t overuse it.
  • Lots of dialogue is inflected as a question even if doesn’t contain question words.
    • “We’re having meatloaf for dinner again?”
  • You can use italics to give inflection. But a book that is full of italics is hard to read. 
    • You did that?
    • You did that?
    • You did that?
    • All different meanings.
  • If you have five characters in a setting, you need said and ask tags.
  • If you have two characters, you need it at the beginning and once in a while later in the dialogue.
  • Kim scratched her head. “I haven’t any idea what you mean.”
  • If you put the action and the dialogue on the same line, then you don’t need the tags.
  • If you put the action first, it will shadow the dialogue. Usually this is good.
  • Orient the reader first in a scene:
    • Never start a scene with disembodied dialogue, because you never want to confuse the reader. You pull them off the page… “Wait, who is that?”
  • Get rid of “he thought”, “he wondered”. If you have a main character, we should always be in their head.
  • When you have 2 or 3 or 4 characters in dialogue, only one has the viewpoint.
    • they can all have dialogue, actions, expressions.
    • but only one can have thoughts: viewpoint character.
    • so if someone thinks a character is lying, only the viewpoint character can make that explicit.
    • Conversely, the viewpoint character can’t tell you how they themselves look.
  • Example from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, starting with “Ooooh, child”:
    • http://books.google.com/books?id=XQm4JGjuX1gC&lpg=PT113&ots=sQQZUMPtGN&dq=midnight%20in%20the%20garden%20of%20good%20and%20evil%20driving%20a%20heap&pg=PT113#v=onepage&q&f=false
  • Second example from Midnight in Garden of Good and Evil, starting with “The thing I like best about squares”
    • http://books.google.com/books?id=XQm4JGjuX1gC&lpg=PT37&dq=midnight%20in%20the%20garden%20of%20good%20and%20evil%20the%20thing%20i%20like%20best%20about%20squares&pg=PT37#v=onepage&q&f=false
    • Examples of word choice and sentence structure. Pick the words that would be in that characters mouth.
  • Grammar is a powerful tool to convey dialect without using misspellings.
  • Foreign words and jargon:
    • Less is more.
    • You don’t need to translate Bon jour. 
    • You can put the foreign word in italics. (for clarity, so the reader knows it isn’t just mispelled)
    • You don’t need to translate when it is show in context. If visiting a sick character, and someone says something to them, you can guess that it’s “get better” or “how are you?”
  • Writing an unreliable narrator
    • example from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Starting with “I lifted my head off the grass”:
    • http://books.google.com/books?id=loC0vNA1a4IC&lpg=PA7&ots=eT8qNaCXkq&dq=The%20Curious%20Incident%20of%20the%20Dog%20why%20were%20you%20holding%20the%20dog&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false
    • Dialogue is intentionally unemotional and flat: “The dog is dead.”
    • Characters who have conflict don’t converse with each other, they converse across each other… orthagonal conversation.
      • He came home late. “What’s for dinner?”
      • “Where the hell were you?” she asked.
    • The “I said,”, “he said” tells us something about the character. It’s coming from a character who is obsessed with detail. It can also add edginess to the dialogue.

Win Big at Willamette: 
How Marni Bates and Laurie McLean Saw, Signed, and Sold
Laurie McLean, Marni Bates, Grace Ledding
Willamette Writers Conference
WWCON11
  • Laurie McLean – literary agent. Last year was first time was WWCON.
  • Signed Marni Bates, who was a three time attendee
  • Grace Ledding is trying to get Marni’s book AWKWARD produced as a (movie)
  • Laurie
    • goes to 20 conferences a year
    • always looking for new clients
    • pitches are stressful, and often nothing like the writing or the person.
    • trying to figure out from a 3 sentence pitch whether their 90,000 word book is worthwhile
    • Thursday night: pitch practice. 
      • It’s highly worthwhile.
      • Not only to practice your pitch but to listen to others to see what works.
      • You want to boil it down to 3 sentences, not give a blow by blow of the torture you put your characters through.
    • Last year Marni comes to pitch practice
      • During the practice Laurie says “that’s great, send me 10 pages”
      • Marni goes to the next room over, and practices there, and an agent offers her representation on the spot.
      • Later Laurie sees Marni and Marni says “I would never take representation from someone who hasn’t read my book.”
      • Laurie needed to go above and beyond to compete with NY agents. And also knew that 15 other agents asked to read it.
    • Marni
      • three years
      • first year: came with a novel she wrote in high school. did have some agents interested. and even got an offer of representation. 
        • turned down representation because she felt the agent viewed her as a teen  with potential rather than a true client
      • ended up writing an autobiography, which was published at 20.
      • came to third year, it’s thursday night practice pitches
      • booked both rooms
      • completed botched first pitch. (couldn’t hold mic, moderator looked at watch halfway through)
      • second pitch went perfectly, best pitch she ever did.
      • got an offer of representation on the spot, from an excellent, really smart agent.
      • but felt like it was an offer based on the fact that she she came across well, as opposed to the book itself.
      • but she had paid for the conference… wasn’t going to sign without shopping around.
      • then she met laurie again, and laurie suggested a morning meeting.
      • at the morning meeting, laurie explained what she could do for her.
      • and said…. i can help you if you can write, but if you can’t write, i can’t do anything. that was what she wanted to hear.
      • Laurie read first 50 pages, then asked for more.
      • I didn’t have more edited to my level of satisfaction. So I asked to provide the rest two weeks after the conference.
      • Soon there was a three book deal with Kensington.
      • And she wrote during school. (full time student, and also spent a a semester studying abroad.)
    • Grace Ledding
      • Laurie me the book earlier this year.
      • Book seemed timely but also timeless. Coming of age books are always favorites, but it was timely because now for the first time all of this stuff is online. you’ll always carry your history with you. [referring to how the main character is spotted by a bunch of people, who record with their phones, and upload to youtube, and the video goes viral.]
      • Tricky to do YA books into movies, because sometimes you get Easy A, and sometimes you get [missed it, something meaningful]
      • That it was written by someone younger made it feel more authentic than if it was written by a 50 year old.
    • The thing about high school is that everything is 100% emotion, so it is all so vivid.
  • Questions
    • What you looking for in a pitch?
      • The book has to be similar enough for the reader to know they are going to have a certain kind of experience, but different enough that it won’t be the same exact experience.
      • Fresh and exciting, but something I can sell.
      • Something powerful: keep the pitch the short. If you can tell me in three sentences what it is, then I can pitch it to an editor, and the editor can pitch it to a book seller, etc.
      • When I heard Marni’s pitch: it was funny, it was YA, but it was different because it had this youtube angle.
      • You have to be able to stand behind your idea. 
      • If you go to Amazon, you made a decision based on a one line description. 
      • You can’t talk around your story. You have to be able to tell it. If you talk around it, then maybe you don’t know your own story. 
      • You can’t be a recluse. Maybe Hemmingway could do it, but now you have to be personable. 
      • “this is the main character. this is the internal and external conflict. this is what they go through to deal with that. this is the resolution.” all that in three sentences.
      • Be mindful of all the opportunities: by going to the thursday pitch session, she is pitching to 5 agents at once. by signing up for both rooms, she pitched to ten. then she marketed the hell out of it: Hey Laurie wants it, and so does Paul,”
      • Social media: it’s not enough to write. You have to do social media, you have to market it. Build your author brand. 
      • It may seem safe to eat with your writer friends, but don’t do that. Go sit and eat with an agents.
      • Even if you don’t think you are ready for pitching, do it anywhere. We put this expectation on them that they are the keeper of the keys and will do everything for us. But the sooner we break through that barrier, and realize they are just people, the better.
      • If you are coming to this conference, spend the $20 and pitch.
      • Marni stalked the board where the appointments are, looked for 
      • Structure:
        • Very simple log line
        • main character and what happens.
    • What should you not do?
      • Many, many things.
      • Don’t guarantee anyone anything: “i guarantee that this will win your awards”
      • Don’t say “my mom thinks I am a great writer”.
      • Don’t say something else said anything.
      • Do start with the log line.
      • Go into deeper detail.
      • A girl, whose embarrassing moment goes to youtube, and becomes famous.
      • Don’t short-sell yourself: “this idea isn’t very good.”
    • I’m confused. Some agents say to use names, some don’t. I went to the pitch practice, and I got contradictory advice from the agents. I have a log line.
      • there is no right or wrong answer.
      • Grace and Laurie are on the phone pitching all day long.
      • Just because you have two pitch meetings, doesn’t mean you wait for those. Pitch to the people around you all day long.
      • In a critique group, sometimes you get too many voices bombarding you, and you get contradictory advice. And you have to learn to trust yourself sometimes.
      • Not all the advice you get is good.
      • Some people said don’t bring material to the conference, but then Laurie asked for it on the spot.
      • When you know that you’ve nailed it, then you’ve nailed it.
    • Format
      • Hello, here is my name. I have written genre, x words, and the title.
      • The Hook
      • The Book: explanation about the book. 2 or 3 sentences.
      • The Cook: who you are.
    • Excuse me, do you have a minute, so I could pitch?
      • Laurie: I have take more pitches that are not scheduled, than one that are scheduled.
    • Length:
      • Not automatic disqualifier. Becomes an economic discussion.
      • But in almost every case a first time novelist has too long of a novel it is too wordy and needs to be cut.
    • Group sessions: be short, be memorable.
    • Kristen Lamb http://warriorwriter.wordpress.com writes about social media for authors.
      • writes about twitter, blogging, etc.
      • 1/3 of writings should be about yourself, your writing journey
      • 1/3 should be retweets of other’s work
      • 1/3 should be selling your book
      • A woman named Kate was commenting on Kristen Lamb’s posts, and writing her own posts.
      • Laurie went to Kate’s site, saw that she had a free download, got it and read it.
      • Then bought a 99 cent novella she wrote.
      • Laurie emailed Kate and asked “do you want representation?”
    • If you are unpublished, then what are you selling with that last third?
      • write some short stuff and sell it. dust off that old unpublished material.
    • What if you’ve written a series?
      • Every first book is the first book in a series. So it’s not worth it.
      • I can’t sell a sequel to a first book that I couldn’t sell.
      • You need something else entirely.
      • So if you finish your first book, then write the first book in a different series.
  • Rejection
    • It’s wave after wave of rejection.
    • when you finally get an agent, then the agent shops it around, and then…
    • you get wave after wave of rejection.
    • then you finally get an editor, and then…
    • you get their notes, which feel like wave after wave of rejection.

Details to Make or Break A Character
Hallie Ephron
Willamette Writers Conference 2011
#WWCON11
  • We use details to show the reader who the character is.
  • Instead of saying “she spent a lot of money on her clothes”, we can describe her clothes.
  • But we don’t want to overdo it. A laundry list of details doesn’t help.
  • Details ought to show us something about the character. “she had blue eyes and brown hair” tells us nothing. “he came to the wedding in bare feet” tells us something about that character.
  • Personal spaces are more important:
    • offices
    • bathrooms
    • kitchens
  • It’s easier to cut than it is to layer in, so better to put too much.
  • Details that are emblematic of disequilibrium. 
    • you don’t want a character for whom everything goes swimmingly.
    • sometimes you force the disequilibrium on them in the story.
    • sometimes it’s just how they come into the story: in a state of disequilibrium.
  • Details:
    • show us something about their personality
    • show us something about their goals
    • show us something about their backstory
  • people can lie about their details:
    • “he told everyone the broken nose was from a football accident, but the truth was that his wife had a mean left hook.”
  • the details have to pay off. they can’t just be planted in the book. they have to get resolved. half of a twenty dollar bill in act I, the other half better show up in act III.
  • something that someone gave the character has extra meaning.
  • wearing a wedding ring when you’re not married, and never loosens his tie
    • “he needs a shrink”
    • “he is a shrink”
  • If you lavish detail on a setting, sometimes the setting itself becomes a character.
  • [Note: there was much more in the session, in the handout and via practice exercises, that isn’t captured here.]