Yale Writer's Conference

For the weeks of June 12-22 I was off in New Haven Connecticut for a Writers Conference at Yale. It's been quite an experience and I met some thoroughly amazing people there.

The idea of a writing conference is to bring a large number of angsty writer types together, stick them in a room and have them do battle using their overripe and easily bruised egos. Hopefully you come out of it with a better handle on the craft, a glimpse in to how readers might view your work, and a few friends you can bounce ideas off of. There was also a master class scheduled for some point during the two week period and some panels involving editors, literary agents and publishing houses.

We were housed in Calhoun College for the summer session and given the normal amenities available to Yale students for the duration. When New Haven was bored of trying to drown us we were hit by a heat wave that brought us into the upper 90's. Realize that our dorms included a 10x20 room fit for a gerbil with double thick insulation. I kid (mostly), we were warned about the heat in the dorms well in advance and I should have bought a fan.

Now for the meaty part. I'll be candid, this was my first proper critique workshop.

Other workshops were less stringent and the writers less involved. In short, an amateur group. I feel that the 'no barrier to entry' thing, much like in the e-publishing scene, causes a drop in quality. In those workshops I was dealing with people bringing in their rough drafts more often then not, and it was painful to try to critique at that level. What do you tell someone who hands you their first attempt?

Our workshops held 12 writers each with a faculty member who oversaw the critiquing process and guided us through the discussions. My adviser was John Crowley who actually teaches creative writing at Yale and is a published sci-fi author (what I aspire to be).

Luckily at this conference, and specifically my group, everyone was great. They were reading and gave great critiques. My class had interesting stories and good ideas for how to improve one-anothers works. We worked well as a group and had great banter, even when we disagreed with one-another it was done respectively.

I'm actually jumping back and forth from my manuscript critique and this blog post, and the written comments are even more insightful then some of the discussion. I truly had a great group of people!

The other works that I was critiquing ranged from fantasy to fiction to creative nonfiction about family genealogies, and the size of the works ranged from packets of short stories to novel excerpts. Everyone brought something different to the table and the writing was superb.

It being the first writing conference at Yale, there were going to be some bugs which will need to be worked out and I actually spoke directly to the organizer who agreed with what I had to say (How often do you get to just chat up the organizer? He was so polite about us critiquing the conference!).

Most of my complaints were just that there was too much in one day. We would have our critiques for several hours, then a student reading followed by faculty readings. Of course all the readings were optional, but having them right up against each other made many people skip quite a few (I'm guilty as well).

The master classes were a big let down. Instead of being an actual class with an established author we ended up at a very personal book talk. This is partially because there wasn't a structured class format given to the authors and also because of the people who attended; our master class author had some exercises with him but people just kept asking questions about his book. This would have been better served at the reading he was doing in 2 hours rather than during our 'class'.

I ended up being too exhausted to do much writing but I did get plenty of reading done, which was something I'm severely lacking in my personal life. I was given lots of reading suggestions in my genre after my critique, and all of the books so far have been dead-on and I'll be reviewing them in the weeks ahead.

The panels about current trends in publishing, how to send in your manuscript, publishers houses, the Penn-Faulkner group, and literary agents were dead-on! I got a lot of great information about every step of the process. I wish there was even more of that and that it hadn't all been (mostly) the same day which made it hard to get through the editors panel.

The grounds of Yale itself are beautiful and have wonderful architecture. I enjoy a bit of photography so the chance to wake up in the college and run around collecting pictures of the grounds was a great experience for me. I've got a large album of pics to run through once I have the time.

I think the Yale Conference has a bit of maturing to do but I would definitely do it again if I had the money and time. The people I met there were amazing and the knowledge I gained about the craft will hopefully help me get my novella ready to publish.

After all, now I have competition.