Individual Entry: 64th Annual WorldCon, Day 2
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August 24, 2006

Life : 64th Annual WorldCon, Day 2

Today was a tough day for decisions. Except for the first session, there was always at least 2, and up to 4 seminars in each schedule slot that were on my "must see" list. Have no idea if I made the right choices; but here's what I did:

What's next from the SciFi Channel
Panel: a rep from SciFi.com
A quick peek at some of the upcoming shows from SciFi followed by some Q&A. The project which most intrigued me was the 6 hour miniseries coming this December "The Lost Room". Something happens in a hotel room in the 50's, and all of the mundane objects in the room at the time acquire unusual powers. If you comb your hair with the comb, time stops for 5 seconds. If you touch the bus ticket, you are immediately transported to a location on Route 66. If you tap the paperclip, a penny appears. A whole secret culture evolves among those who know about this, with people collecting and trading the artifacts. The most powerful item is the room key itself, which fits any door lock and transforms the door into a portal to any other door in the world, including the door to the original hotel room.

Aliens Among Us
Panel: a collection of writers including one trained anthropologist
The concept of the session was that anthropology can serve as good inspiration for someone designing an alien society - that the diversity of real human cultures can provide interesting ideas for the writer. Unfortunately, the debate quickly digressed into talking about how to do this respectfully to the source culture and I lost interest. So I moved on to my second choice....

Revise, Revise, Revise
Panel: a collections of published writers, some of whom also teach writing
This was a great session on various approaches to getting from the first draft to the final one (or at least the one you turn in to the publisher, understanding that they will desire their own revisions). I have three pages of notes from this one. Some of the key points were:

All authors are different, there is no "one size fits all" approach. Even for a given author, each story is different. Different stories come from different places in the subconscious, so what worked for one may not work for another.

There was a strong consensus that the first pass at revision should focus only on structural issues, and that the level of detail you look at with each subsequent pass should be progressively smaller. Everyone felt that the biggest mistake novice writers make is getting into detailed wordsmithing too early, with the result that they get too invested in good phrases and are unwilling to make bigger changes that may be needed. A couple of the authors felt you should only revise the document twice before sending to your editor - once for structure and a second time for style and wordsmithing.

Everyone felt that reading the text out loud was important, and if you can get a friend to read it to you, that's even better.

Some suggested that you should never edit a document in place when revising it, no matter what the computer lets you do. They felt that retyping the whole thing forces you to think about every word again and produces a better product.

There was a long discussion on outlining, and one author on the panel has the most useful opinion I have herd on the subject. They took the point of view that every author has strength and weaknesses, and that you should design an outline style that addresses your weaknesses. If you tend to lose your character arcs in all of the detailed action, then outline the character arcs in advance; but trust your ability to write the action without outlining. On the other hand if you tend to write your character arc well but get lost in the flow of the action, the outline the action. And so on.

Writing SF for TV and Movies
Panel: Some writers with a bit of experience
It was the hope for panels like this that I decided to go to this WorldCon. The panel was packed with TV writers whose work I know well, going back to D.C. Fontanta who wrote many episodes of the original Star Trek (and became associate producer for the show), and Melinda M. Snodgrass whose recent work I am a fan of.

The concept of the session was to talk about the differences between writing for the page vs the screen. To start off with, the panelists agreed that you have to turn the story inside out. In novels, you generally write from inside the character's head looking out, while for the screen, you are almost always looking from the outside in. The result is that you need to be even better than in novels at "show, don't tell". Dialog is everything in script writing, and prose descriptions should be minimal. Famously, the script for the movie "Sparticus", in describing the key fight in the gladiator arena, only says "they fight". People reviewing scripts written on spec often just read the dialog. The pace of a script is unnaturally fast for most novel writers, particularly for TV. With only 42 minutes to tell your story and the need to set up commercial breaks, you can't have any extraneous content. In fact, all of the writers on the panel who also wrote novels said that their novels got better because of the script writing experience - much tighter and clearer.

2081: The Remake everyone was waiting for
Panel: miscellaneous Schmos
This panel turned out to be a hoax, designed to see how far they could push the audience before they realized it was a joke. The idea was that Sony was going to "re imagine" 2001 a Space Odyssey for the 40th anniversary of the show, only as the panel described the project it would become clear that they were butchering it. I realized what was going on after about 5 minutes and moved on to my next choice (although I did check back at the end to make sure I was right)...

Distribution: how SF gets to you
Panel: missed the introductions
The session was on how book distribution works and how that effects the writer. Things like the differences between mass-market and "trade" paperbacks, etc. What I heard when I came in after leaving 2081 seem to me to be fairly incoherent with lots of isolated facts and figures and I decided to punt (having already wasted 5 minutes). I know it might have improved if I had stuck around; but I wasn't willing to risk it given that there were two other seminars I wanted to see in this time slot. So, I moved on...

The "Surface" of an "Invasion" is at the "Threshold"
Panel: missed intros, but there was at least one writer and one TV critic
The panel was about the three new TV shows last season that involved "alien" invasions that start in the water, and in particular why they all failed to gain a mass audience. A lot of the discussion duplicated a lot of what was said in yesterday's session on "why SF doesn't last on TV", only in applied form. All of these shows were viewed by the panel as "Children of Lost", down to the one-word ambiguous names. They were all guesses by the networks at what made Lost a succeed, and all (in the opinion of the panel) guessed wrong.

Surface never figured out what type of show it wanted to be. Threshold had a great pilot; but then the abandoned all of the character stuff that made the pilot interesting. Invasion was acknowledged as the best of the shows; but it lacked a clear hero that the audience could connect with, and relied on the audience watching each show to pick up all of the clues. It eventually became too complicated, with too many characters having different agendas for a mass audience to follow it. The consensus was that Invasion and Threshold could have probably been written to succeed; but that Surface was too much of a jumble to do anything with.

British SF Television Today
Panel: a bunch of British TV writers and one American critic
I'll start off by saying that while the information content wasn't as high as I hoped, the British writers were an outrageously funny crew and I needed some good laughs at that point in the day. They started with a long list of TV shows currently in production in the UK which we should look for (or avoid) on this side of the pond. "Life on Mars" has already started to play (I'll do a separate blog on it someday). The most highly recommend was "Robin Hood" which isn't actually SciFi; but has a lot of SciFi writers working on it so the dialog is intelligent and snappy. The most interesting news is that a new series of "Sapphire and Steel" is being produced with the original writer from the 60's at the helm.

A lot of the discussion however was about the impact the new "re imagined" Dr. Who has had on British TV. The panelists told some of the story of how it got made (the successful writer refused to do any more work for the BBC unless they let him do Dr. Who). How the BBC then pawned the project off on BBC Wales because they didn't want to waste their time on it; but how the production has been so successful that Cardiff is now becoming a major TV production location thanks to Dr. Who. Given this success, the BBC has now taken a much more positive view on SciFi, and is funding a bunch of new shows - not all of which are worthy. They also talked about how the BBC is starting to adopt some more "American" production methodologies, with both good and bad results (although the writers thought it was mostly for good).

Another interesting side fact that came up - the reason DVDs make in the UK are so "bare bones" - without a lot of extras - is that by law the censors have to approve everything you put on the disk, and that approval costs an outrageous amount per minute of content. Given the cost, they just don't bother over there.

Publishing Science Fiction
Panel: a mix of publishers and editors from small, medium and large press
I didn't stick around long as they weren't saying much I didn't already know from previous WorldCons. The best comment was the "Three laws of editorics":
1) you will buy books which are best for your publisher's bottom line
2) you will buy books which are best for your readers except where such purchases conflict with law 1
3) you will buy books which are best for the genre except where such purchases conflict with laws 1 and 2
stayed about 10 minutes then moved on to...

Good Endings:
Panel: TV and print Writers (including Fiona Avery) and some writer/instructors
The panel was about how to end a story. The key concept is that "writing is a promise, which must be fulfilled in the conclusion". That if you are having problems writing the end of the story, the problem is likely to be in the middle of the story where you didn't set things up right - "the middle justifies the end". Another choice quote was "non-fiction is about facts, fiction is about truth" - that the best ending for any story must be emotionally honest with the characters you have created.

The bulk of the discussion was about how to correctly "twist" the ending. The best endings are those which the reader doesn't see coming, but feels (after the fact) that they should have. The list of individual ideas on this is too long to enumerate here; but among the better suggestions (IMHO) is to fulfill the reader's external expectations but have the emotional impact on the characters to be unexpected, or visa versa - have the character's internal emotional conflict resolved by some unexpected external means. Another option is provide some information at the end which causes the reader to reevaluate the story as a whole (The Left Hand of Darkness was given as a good example of this - where you are given information which causes you to re-evaluate how one character felt about another, and therefore reinterpret certain events in the story).

There was also more discussion on the different types of writers - those than plan their stories, and those that grow them organically as the write them. The latter can actually be surprised themselves by how their stories end.

Posted by Steven at August 24, 2006 10:57 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kristen at August 26, 2006 08:51 PM

Posted by: Steven at August 27, 2006 07:49 AM

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