Reno Conference–Day One

I’m going to try and recap the Reno conference as best I can. Unfortunately I didn’t have a digital camera with me, but if I can find some photos from friends, I’ll upload them. I’m not going to worry about Wednesday, as it was mostly just checking in and traveling, so let’s start with Thursday:

Thursday: I attended the Pro Retreat. It was an interesting workshop, and I stayed for most of it since I had submitted the first page and synopsis of my Victorian book, Wedded to the Enemy. The purpose of the retreat was to inspire the unpublished and to encourage us. We listened to a speech by Barbara Samuel which was nice, and then came the agent panel. I wasn’t sure if my stuff would be selected to be read, but it turned out it was. This part was an, er, “educational” experience. The three agents placed an overhead of our work up in front of approximately 500 people and read it aloud and commented on it. Good news and bad news with this–on the one hand, we could get honest feedback of our work. The bad news was, it was a butchery. The first person’s entry was slashed. They didn’t have one nice thing to say about the writing or the synopsis. Same with person #2. And #3. I had a hard time with this because…well, if you’re trying to inspire the unpublished, hacking their work to pieces in front of 500 people isn’t exactly inspiring. While honesty is good, I think it would have been better if the agents had taken an American Idol approach. Someone needed to be the Paula Abdul to salvage the poor writer’s broken ego. Instead, there were pretty much three Simon Cowells.

As for me, I’m pretty thick-skinned. I can take criticism. Also, I knew that my synopsis was awful because I tried to cram a 5 page synopsis into 1 page. I didn’t realize that it would be part of the critique–I thought it was so the agent/editor would have background information. So when my entry came up, I was expecting to be smashed on the synopsis.

To my surprise, they didn’t butcher my writing as much as the other folks. They commented how the heroine’s actions were contradictory to the dialogue (which I did on purpose), but they didn’t say anything truly negative. That made me feel pretty good, such that I didn’t particularly care what they said about the synopsis. You’re not trying to sell a synopsis, after all. Nobody reads those except editors and agents. On the whole, I did get some constructive feedback, so I think it was worth it. Still, I feel badly for the ones who were slammed. They didn’t deserve that. Everyone is a beginner at some point, and I think it’s important to encourage the beginners to keep writing, keep submitting, and overall not to give up. Next year, I hope if they do this again, the agents/editors will try to focus on one strength of the writer and offer some words of hope. Heaven knows there’s enough rejections out there.