In Which I Wrap Up

This will be the last post regarding the 4th Street Fantasy Conference Hannah and I hit a few weeks ago. There's no real rhyme or reason to this post, I'm just going to list remaining quotes or comments I wrote down made by the authors at the conference. They're all interesting but weren't strong enough for a whole blog post (or I just got lazy. Probably both)



Patricia C Wrede - She suggested that as an author, you should really hire an accountant to help out with the taxes and junk. She doesn't have one, but that's only because she was an accountant until she could support herself with her writing


Elizabeth Bear - "Nobody with a clean house ever wrote a book"


Patricia C Wrede - "There's only 2 rules to writing. You have to write and what you write has to work"


Lois McMaster Bujold & Steve Brust - both touched on the term Burn Story, which meant writing through the story points as fast as possible, trusting you'll come up with more.


Steve Brust - in regards to Burn Story - "If you're saving something (a plot point, etc) for later, you won't come up with something new"


Elizabeth Bear - "Writing is too hard to do well, which is why we have to do it in stages with revision"


Sherwood Smith - In regards to derivativeness of Eragon and Christopher Paolini - It's possible the people who published Eragon did so purely for financial reasons and the money, but we mustn't forget that Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon out of joy, because he loved those aspects of the genre.


Emma Bull - in response to Sherwood Smith's above comment - Joy, though, doesn't necessarily = readable fiction. That's where craft comes in.


And to wrap it up, Elizabeth Bear shared a motto she and her CPs had in regards to getting that agent or book deal - "Right Day, Right Desk, Right Story, Write Better"