The 3.6 Percent
On Writers’ Conferences, Small Victories, and Halloween Cemeteries
Two weeks ago, I flew to Cincinnati to attend the Writer’s Digest Conference. It was big enough to feel like a party but small enough to feel like a community, which is about as good as conferences get for me. I began with a workshop with Ann Garvin, whose books There’s No Coming Back from This and Bummer Camp I love. Like her protagonists, Ann is witty and sharp as can be. She reminded us that “a story is the emotional journey of a character,” and that the journey they undertake should be tied to the character’s core wound—the formative pain that shapes their worldview and determines their choices.
The core wound is a fabulous tool for creating conflict and mapping our characters’ trajectories, and what our characters want should be linked to that wound. For example, Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz (Wynona Rider) wants to rebel, and nothing delights her more than aggravating her self-absorbed stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara). However, as Ann taught us, the want is a mask for what the character needs, which in Lydia’s case is to heal from her mother’s death by again having parents who love her. Lydia’s attempts to unnerve her stepmother never go as planned, but they do result in her getting her need fulfilled. She befriends the “recently deceased” couple (Gena Davis and Alec Baldwin) who owned the house Lydia and her family move into, and they become her (yes, dead, but also loving) parental figures. Lydia doesn’t get what she wanted, but she gets what she needed.
After helping us figure out what our characters wanted and needed, Ann had us work on the daunting, but oh-so-important logline (or pitch) for our books. The logline captures your book’s characters and conflicts in a sentence or two.
Ann asked for volunteers, and I shared the logline for my novel Grand Gestures: “When her marriage hits the rocks, an Ivy League professor and her Broadway legend mother-in-law/best friend set out to rescue her imploding family by making a musical together.”
Ann told me she liked it, but something was off. “The only disconnect is that I don’t know how making the musical fixes the family or their marriage,” she said. “Why is a musical the thing that can help them?”
I had the familiar “Yes!” but “Oh, no!” feeling that comes with getting great feedback you’re not sure how to implement. I spent the rest of the workshop taking notes while fiddling with my logline. This is what I came up with:
“When her marriage hits the rocks, an Ivy League professor, her playwright husband, and her Broadway legend mother-in-law/best friend set out to rescue their imploding family by trying to make a hit musical despite the spectacular failure of their latest collaboration.”
Ann was enthusiastic about the change, which was thrilling. I spent that evening revising the materials I’d written to pitch my novel to agents at the conference. The first agent I talked to couldn’t have been lovelier or more welcoming. She liked my new logline, but she warned me two of my comps didn’t work. Comps are books (or film and TV shows) that are similar to yours. You share them to help agents (and later publishers) get a sense of what your book is like. The agent agreed that Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and my beloved Gilmore Girls were fitting comps for Grand Gestures. However, she worried that Lily King’s Writers & Lovers was too literary and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People was too high-concept. Lucky for me, Jane Friedman was giving a talk on comps the following morning.
Jane is one of the most astute thinkers about the publishing industry and has spent decades helping writers make their way in it. She began the presentation by tracing her own comp-finding process for her book, The Business of Being a Writer. She explained that while it might be tempting to use juggernauts like Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, you can’t predict who will reach that kind of status. If someone is a household name, they’re probably not the right comp. Their books sell because of the person who wrote them more than because of the books themselves. The same goes for celebrities. As Jane said to our great amusement, “You can’t use Prince Henry’s book as a comp, even if yours also deals with mother issues.”
She warned us against selecting the classics because our books need to sell in the contemporary landscape. Even for contemporary authors, you want comps written by people who are still alive so you can foster a friendship and support each other’s careers. For comps, you want to “give the agent a sense of the vibes and feel of the book.” Jane settled on Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum for her comp, and I went with Tracey Lange’s We are the Brennans (you can learn about it below).
So far, the conference had yielded a logline and a new comp. Then thanks to the multitalented Jess Zafarris, I learned about ways to use my nascent YouTube and TikTok channels to promote my work (something you can also do if you’re not too camera shy). During the pandemic, Jess needed a creative outlet (didn’t we all?) and she began making word-origin videos on TikTok. She eventually built an audience (and I mean an audience… she has 95.6K followers on TikTok!), and publishers took notice (they notice that kind of thing). Her TikTok success led to her two etymology books, Once Upon a Word and Words from Hell.
Jess suggested we make videos that add value to others. She said, “People want entertainment, to learn new things, to feel like there’s someone else who feels like they do.” Her videos give viewers an understanding of where words come from. Mine take viewers on fun adventures to museums, pyramids, and amusement parks. As you film, she reminded us to: “Use your arms. Be animated. Do it like you’re a theater kid.” She left us with a message that goes beyond social media to life itself: “Be nice. Be inclusive. If you’re mean and nasty, you will probably go viral, but you won’t have fun.” Amen!
The conference brought amazing new people into my life, but it also reconnected me with one of my oldest friends in the US. Back in 1993, when I moved to Dayton, Ohio, I enrolled in Centerville High School.There was no cooler teacher at Centerville than Katrina Kittle—goddess of all things theater and champion of film and literature. Katrina was working on a novel back then, and that novel became her beautiful debut Traveling Light. Now a six-book veteran, Katrina knows how to write books that linger with readers for years, as hers have lingered with me. Katrina and I had dinner and caught up on the seven years since we’d last hung out. Like the best friendships, it felt like we’d never stopped being in each other’s lives, and hopefully if (when?) Grand Gestures gets published, we’ll continue to connect at Writers’ Conferences.
Here's some of the brilliant insight Katrina had on dialogue during her presentation. Dialogue is a great medium to provide information about our characters’ emotions. If you think of your writing as a film, what your characters say is sound, and you want to complement that sound with visuals by telling us what they’re doing as they speak and how they react to each other. Not to mention how they feel about the conversation. Avoid full-on realism, “Our characters need to be more articulate than the average citizen. Dialogue has direction, pattern, and purpose.” Dialogue is particularly engaging when you have subtext: “What the characters are really talking about beneath what they’re actually talking about.” When you let readers catch a glimpse of what characters are hiding, you’re inviting them to be like detectives, and who doesn’t like a good puzzle?
I came back from the conference ablaze with community and possibility. I was flying high, and instead of crashing (as often happens when we’re flying high), I got to fly a little higher when I found out that the BlackList, which is an organization that helps emerging writers (usually screenwriters) get their work produced, had selected Grand Gestures to be one of the 11 inaugural fiction projects they’ll recommend to thousands of entertainment and publishing industry professionals in their newsletter. As they explained in the Twitter thread about our books, “The following unpublished manuscript excerpts have received a score of 8/10 or higher from a professional Black List fiction reader… Less than 3.6% of manuscript evaluations have received an overall score of >8 since The Black List launched fiction on September 4th.”
And yes, they used the logline I wrote thanks to Ann Garvin and the amazing humans at Writer’s Digest!
Unearthed Photo
Jess Zafarris told us to “make videos about the intersection between your work and the themes in your brand.” I interviewed writers at the conference (stay tuned for that series) and loved every second of that interaction. But those interviews were about writing, not about my writing.
So here's my first attempt to blend our “family goes on delightful adventures to cool places” brand with my novel. I hope you like it. If not, at least we had fun running around the cemetery as the Ghostbusters’ Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz (with my costume-adverse husband as one of the franchise’s sandworms), and The Office’s Michael Scott.
Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)
We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange
If you like big-hearted family sagas, Tracey Lange’s debut is for you. After a five-year self-imposed exile, Sunday Brennan returns home to her brothers, father, and ex-fiancé. And it’s about time. They’re struggling to keep their two pubs afloat without her. As we watch them come together again, the reason for Sunday’s departure unravels as the suspense builds up. It’s the all-encompassing love the Brennans feel for each other, though, that turns this novel into a read you can’t put down, and whose characters won’t leave you for a long time.
The Witches at the End of the World by Chelsea Iversen
It’s the season for witches, and Chelsea Iversen’s debut takes you on a hell of a witching ride. During the 17th century in Norway, sisters Minna and Kaija have been living in the woods after their witch mother was burned at the stake. While Minna’s powers are out-of-control and vengeful, Kaija uses her magic to heal and protect. Minna wants the village to pay for what they did to their mother. Kaija wants the village to become her home again. This novel is one of the most accurate portrayals I’ve read of what it’s like to use your intuition and desire to make things happen, and you’ll be rooting for these two witches to get what they want—even though those two realities can’t co-exist.
Your Turn
What transformative advice have you gotten lately and what doors did it open for you? What are you reading and watching?
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