Good grief, am I still posting notes about this conference? Let’s see if I can get all the rest in before the end of October.
First, I don’t really have notes from Michelle Andelman’s sessions. Her keynote was one of those Why Writers Need Agents speeches and her breakout was How to Write a Query Letter and both of those cover ground that’s well travelled for me.
Here’s what I have from editor Deborah Vetter,
The theme of the conference was a boxing one, I forget the title. Oh, I remember, “Don’t Give Up the Fight.” Wait, can that be it? It looks funneh. ANYway– Deborah Vetter opened her speech by asking what do writing and boxing have in common?
“You have to learn how to take a punch.” And a roundhouse kick, and snap kicks and fast kicks and jabs and uppercuts and . . . oh wait, that’s me, not Deborah Vetter.
She talked about the importance of “startling unexpected details”, mentioning a real life story from a friend of hers about a flood and the pressure of the floodwater cracking the toilet as a memorable detail.
Illustrator David Wiesner’s first job was a cover for Cricket magazine. I did not know that.
She emphasized the importance of studying the market, especially if you want to write for mags.
Speaking of mags, LADYBUG needs super short stories. Like around one hundred words long. They see a lot of down on the farm stuff and would like more urban fiction.
CRICKET mag needs science fiction, fantasy, mystery and humor. They still want re-told folktales but have enough Asian themed ones. She’d like to see some from the Land Down Under (no, she didn’t call it that) and the American West, Appalachia and Africa. They love places that start with the letter A.
What is wrong with me this evening?
She encouraged writers to retell true life stories as fiction. I thought that was interesting. She said, go to your local archives, look things up. Talk with grandparents. Everyone has a story to tell and children haven’t heard most of them yet.
