I’ll be moderating a panel about debut writers at the Conversations & Connections conference in DC on Saturday, April 16. To entice you, here’s an excerpt of an interview with one of the panelists, Dylan Landis, whose Normal People Don’t Live Like This is an incredible novel-in-stories:
What do you hope attendees bring away from the panel discussion?
"Concrete and useful stuff, because we’ll tell you everything we did and learned.
"But hopefully people will touch base with something interior that keeps them writing through the dark periods. I’d like to quote Sugar*, advice columnist for The Rumpus, who writes: Don’t conflate the book with the book deal. “They are two separate things. The one you are in charge of is the book…Your cause is to write a great book and then to write another great book and to keep writing them for as long as you can. That is your only cause. It is not to get a six figure book deal.”
"That’s the flag I wave, the Sugar flag. Are you writing from the places that make you shake, as the screenwriter Gil Dennis puts it? Are you staying in scene? Are you reading good books and taking them apart? Are you revising again and again?"
Read the rest of the interview here: http://writersconnectconference.com/word/?page_id=143
Details/registration information about the conference here: http://writersconnectconference.com/word/?page_id=2
*And be sure to read this, the Dear Sugar column that Dylan alludes to: http://therumpus.net/2011/03/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-69-we-are-all-savages-inside/