If what you want from a conference is instruction in how to write better, I have bad news for you: I’ve rarely seen this done well. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as teaching is an art that not everybody has the skill for. Being a successful editor or author does not necessarily mean you have the ability to teach others to do what you do.
Many talks about the craft of writing essentially come down to some speaker telling you over and over again that you should, among other things, show and not tell! (Which is not necessarily a useless exercise. Some beginning writers might be hearing the general principles for the first time, and even experienced writers might find it inspirational to hear them recited again, like a religious creed, so they can reaffirm their belief in them and renew their efforts to follow them.)
Most talks go further and do some showing as well. They include examples illustrating the virtues of good writing, drawn from published works. I’ve come to think of this as the standard talk on the craft of writing, and it is almost always entertaining and uplifting. It’s always a pleasure to hear good writing read aloud and praised.
Nevertheless, it could be better. Simply seeing “point B” described and then illustrated by an example doesn’t necessarily help you get there from point A. Also, I’ve experienced talks where the examples themselves were not so good, sometimes because they didn’t really illustrate the point the speaker was trying to make, and sometimes because the writing has not actually been that good! (Yes, it’s true. Published authors are not necessarily good writers.)
The very best talks of this type go one step further: they include bad examples as well. In the two talks of this caliber that I’ve heard (in the nine conferences I’ve been to!) this was accomplished by showing earlier drafts of some piece of writing, sharing what the critique of it was, and then showing the final version. This is a complete lesson! You see the before; you see the after. You nod your head in understanding.
I’ve heard two other outstanding presentations on the craft of writing.
In one, a picture book author laid out a simple and extremely narrow structure for a successful picture book. (So narrow, in fact, that she admitted not all of her own published books followed it.) Her rules were not the usual general writing principles, but very specific guidelines about what needed to happen on the first page, the characteristics the protagonist should have, how the middle episodes of the story should be structured, and the kind of twist that should happen at the end. She then proceeded to critique manuscripts that we submitted ahead of time, showing how each one followed or did not follow the model she had laid out.
I’m not sure whether to even call what she did instruction in the craft of writing – it was more like a really targeted and high-powered approach to the business of publishing – but it was definitely much more useful in its own way, especially to beginning writers, than someone standing up there and telling them to, say, “Cut! Cut! Cut!” without showing them how to do it!
The most extraordinary talk on the craft of writing that I ever heard came in one of the first SCBWI events I attended. An author introduced an advanced concept of which I later learned she was known as the main proponent and maybe even inventor: psychic distance. Though I was new to children’s book writing at the time, I was not new to writing by any means, but this was new to me. I’d written serious (non-genre) fiction and poetry for over twenty years and never heard any teacher or fellow writer talk about psychic distance.
(Note: I don’t have time or space, and perhaps not even the skill, to explain the concept here, but I may give it a try in a future blog post.)
The new concept had an immediate effect on my writing. I found many errors involving psychic distance in my work in progress, and have continued to find them in everything I’ve written since. It was a remarkable thing, after writing for so long, to be gifted with this new tool for improving my work. It might be one reason I’ve continued to sign up for these SCBWI conferences, despite my middling opinion of how well they generally teach craft. The very next speaker could well surprise me again!
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This is a sidebar to my three-part Guide to SCBWI Conferences.
Other sidebars:
