Greetings and salutations. It is I, Greyson.

Clevenger and I have not been subtle about the recent conventions we have attended. This time last month, I wrote a blog post that effectively gave an itinerary of my trip to Chicago, and a week ago I wrote about the efforts of recovering from the trip. Earlier I wrote about the physical and emotional aspects of the trip. Now I want to focus on what I learned, particularly at the C2E2 panels.

Probably the most disappointing was a panel on Researching in the Modern Era. They did some good summations on researching, sharing some fun stories about unusual sources some of the authors had uncovered over their careers. That being said, they didn’t really say much about using new and modern resources. Instead, they discussed general topics that require research when you are writing modern fiction. There were two points that I was able to take away from this talk. The first was having a third party look over any manuscript that includes a topic you are personally invested in, to ensure that the pieces included after edits are the parts that serve the story, as opposed to being trivia that you, and perhaps you alone, find fascinating. This is going to be important with my own book, Ghosting Myself, to make sure that my own nostalgia isn’t getting in the way of the story. The other point was the idea of looking for research groups that already exist on a topic you might be looking to include in your story. The idea of looking for not just written sources on a topic, but living experts.

One panel we attended was less about literature, and more of a presentation. The author John Jackson Miller has written the first novel set in the universe of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, and he gave a presentation discussing the state of the comics industry and the superhero film industry prior to this movie, and the massive impact the changes were that came about because of this movie. While the presentation was not necessarily literary in nature, it was still informative and entertaining.

The other two panels were equally entertaining and informative. The first was a discussion on Chicago area authors. There were three authors on the panel. One had only been a fulltime writer for around a year, while another had been fulltime for approximately five years. The third was Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series. I found it interesting that having read the books and watched the movie, I never caught that the city it was set in was Chicago. There was a lot of discussion about setting books not just in Chicago specifically, but the general do’s and dont’s of using real world locations in fiction. The agreed consensus was that it was a good idea to include well known landmarks and locations, and that you could easily make up your own businesses and buildings where you need them. But the biggest trouble you could get into was when you moved down to the street and neighborhood level. If you claim that Street X intersects with Avenue Y, then if they don’t for real, apparently you will hear about it from readers for years!

The final panel was titled Writing Horror That Doesn’t Suck. We sat in on this one because of me moving into the genre of YA Gothic Horror, but it ended up giving us ideas that translated well to any genres. The things that could be taken as general writing advice was to have an opinion on a social situation or a philosophy of thought. For instance, in discussions after this panel, we realized that Clevenger has a lot of villains who work to control what information is given to the general populace. That tends to be a source of power and evil in his worldbuilding. Another was to always write the action, not the character’s reaction to the action. Instead of saying, “I noticed an odd taste in my mouth”, say what the taste was. Trust the reader to know that you noticed it. The final general advice was to ensure you don’t fix problems too early. The longer you can keep the reader invested in a problem, but not yet provide a solution, the more the content will matter to the reader.

There was also some good advice specific to horror, and potentially to mystery. Stay in your genre, and if you are going to mix in another genre, give the reader some hints that a shift is coming up. Make sure you know the details of what is going on so that you can keep internal consistency, but the less you share with the reader, the more they will be invested. Unpredictability is better than shock tactics, but if you do use shock tactics, give some artistic merit for how they are presented. And finally, in good stories, the protagonist is always going to be more important than the monster. Alien worked because you almost never saw the alien, and in the initial screenings of Jaws, the audience laughed at the comical shark. Once Spielberg went back with a “less is more” approach, he came up with the classic we know today. When it comes to the monster, “tell, don’t show”.

So there you have it. I suppose one final note I have on the format of these panels, aside from the subject matter, was that the audience greatly changes the tone of the meeting, regardless of the quality of the presenters. In two of these, we had great audiences, listening intently and then asking intelligent questions. In the other two, we had people around us that either kept shouting out opinions during the speakers’ time, or hogged the Q&A session will multiple pedantic followup questions. Even still, they were all A+ experiences, and I look forward to future panels at future conventions.

Until then, don’t forget to love one another.

Greyson Black