All Things in Moderation

I had the good fortune to serve as a moderator in both conferences I attended this year, Bouchercon and Creatures, Crimes, and Creativity. I’ve been going to writer’s conferences since 2004, and pretty much annually since 2008. I’ve been on panels at either Bouchercon or C3 or both every year but one since 2012. In that time I’ve been lucky to work with moderators who were uniformly excellent and also had differing styles. It was only natural I’d want to try my hand one day after seeing how effortlessly Sandra Parshall, Peter Rozovsky, Jim Born, et al pulled it off for me.

It ain’t as easy as they make it look.

I have no doubt there are moderators who don’t think twice about getting up in front of a couple of hundred people and asking a handful of writers questions off the tops of their heads. We’ve all seen them and can probably identify them. By and large they’re the shitty moderators. The panels roam, the questions either don’t give the writers anything to talk about that’s informative and entertaining (a good panel is both), or is so vague no one knows what to do with it. I’m sure some people can pull it off. I’m sure I’ve seen a panel or two where that happened. I’m also sure there are moderators out there right now who do this and think they pulled it off. They’re probably wrong.

Preparation is important because there’s going to be a lot of stuff going on the moderator has to keep track of. “How much time is left” may be the most obvious, and it’s close to most important when considered in conjunction with other elements. Sure, there’s a volunteer there to tell you when you have 10 minutes, five, two, clear out there’s people waiting. What do you do if you’re 25 minutes into a 50-minute panel and you’re three-quarters of the way through your questions? Even worse, what if you’ve been coming up with questions more or less off the top of your head, realize you’re running out of ideas, look at your watch and realize you still have half an hour? I saw this happen at Bouchercon—I won’t say in which panel—and the moderator depended on the audience to fill the last 20 minutes. That’s not right, and it’s not fair to anyone.

In addition to tracking time you’re also gauging the audience. Anyone who’s done a reading, sat on a panel, or given any kind of public performance knows not all audiences are created equal. If a certain type of question is dying, change up. It’s probably a good idea to have at least half again as many questions as you think you’ll need, covering different aspects of your topic. That allows you to switch off if what you thought would be clever just lies there and rots.

It’s also important to know your panelists. Not necessarily personally—though that never hurts—but their writing. A good moderator should probably read at least one book by each panelist, but at the very least should be familiar with their work through reviews, synopses, and excerpts. Specific questions may present themselves, but you’ll also know what kinds of questions will work better for the group as a whole. Another benefit to this relates to the previous paragraph, except in reverse: a line of inquiry goes well and you run out of related questions. Then is a good time to go with the flow. The last thing you want to do is to get everyone in a good mood—your panel is revved up, the audience is revved up—and you decide to talk about something else. Buzzkill.

This year’s Bouchercon was my first moderator gig. Five writers (including one good friend, Terrence McCauley, yay me) including multi-bestseller Heather Graham, so I knew there would be a decent crowd. I polled a few moderators I’d seen before and thought did a good job—including the Master of Moderation, Peter Rozovsky—and started my research and working on questions several weeks in advance.

One panelist had to pull out due to an illness in the family. I felt bad for him, but the panel was not in danger. I had plenty of material. Stepping onto the dais I learned another panelist had taken ill and was missing.

Now I’m down to three. Fast math in my head. Fifty minute panel. Enough questions to allow five panelists to speak for half again that long. (So I hoped.) Only three panelists. Should still come out to about 45 minutes. Leave five to ten minutes for audience participation and I’ll be fine.

Then the real benefit of preparation made an appearance. Our other panelist—a fine writer and nice man based on our conversation in the Green Room—had never been on a panel before, got nervous and vapor locked. It happens. I’ll not name him as I don’t want to embarrass him, and after the event I felt badly for him. During the event I mostly felt bad for me, wondering what the fuck I was going to do to fill the time.

Some say luck is where preparation meets opportunity. In my case it was more like where preparation met Heather Graham and Terrence McCauley, both of whom stepped up to give more expansive answers as time went on. Shared a few anecdotes tangentially related to what was under discussion.

Therein lies the biggest lesson I learned: be generous with your panel and they’ll reciprocate. Take the time to make your best effort to understand their work and ask questions to help them put their best feet forward and they’ll carry you. The more attention the moderator can place on the panel, the better.

And should my third, nervous panelist read this: I’ll do a panel with you again anytime.

I Went to a Panel and They Put Me to Work

After three days of working on a cogent and well-crafted post for today I found the piece to be 1600 words of swamp. So maybe another time for that one. Or maybe not. If my thoughts have not coalesced enough for me to salvage something out of 1600 already edited and re-written words, they’re thought probably best kept to myself. I always try to have a back-up post ready, and here it is.

Conference season is seven months away (for me, at least) but today I’m looking back to a fun memory from last year’s Creature, Crimes, and Creativity conference. (The organizers’ omission of the Oxford comma in the title on the web site’s home page would ordinarily be sufficient reason for me to boycott, but the conference itself makes up for it.) Each year C3 has several featured authors. (This year Reed Farrel Coleman and Alexandra Sokoloff will be the two keynote speakers, with Donna Andrews and Cerece Rennie Murphy rounding out the special guests.) Each featured author has a panel slot—a “master class”—where they talk about various aspects of writing or how they built their careers. One of last year’s keynotes was Heather Graham, who’s written more bestsellers than most people have read. (F. Paul Wilson was the other.)

Heather had a unique approach to her master class: she made it a workshop, with a writing exercise for the audience. There were several conditions:

The first line had to be: The blood dripped slowly down the wall.

We then had to work in four characters: a policemen, a stripper, a firefighter, and a model. Four adjectives also had to make an appearance: bald, peg-legged, tall, and hideous. We had about twenty minutes to come up with something after which Heather had the more stout-hearted of us read what we’d written.

The results were surprisingly good. Amazing in a couple of instances. This is not my preferred method of working, but I gave it a shot. Here’s my effort (Which I readily admit was not the best):

The blood dripped slowly down the wall. Pictures, some covered in spatter, showed she’d been a model. “I’ll be damned,” the policeman said, scratched his head. “A peg-legged stripper.”

“No,” the stripper said. “That’s my outfit. I say I’m a model, but she really was one. Hands and face, mostly. Things that didn’t show her leg.” The face that had been so photogenic now a hideous mass of blood and brain.

A firefighter stuck his head into the room and the cop noticed for the first time how tall the stripper was. “No fire here.”

“False alarm?” the cop said.

“Not for lack of effort.” The firefighter pointed over his shoulder. “Fire didn’t catch. I’m not sure what set the alarm off.”

“I did.” Both men turned to the stripper.

*  *  *

Maybe someday I’ll make something of that. There’s Noir at the Bar potential there if I find the right angle.

Creatures, Crime, and Creativity Conference - 2015

Another Creatures, Crime, and Creativity conference (C3) is in the books, and, while a conflict with the Baltimore Book Fair held attendance to below previous levels, artistic success was once again achieved. A few personal highlights:

F. Paul Wilson, creator of the Repairman Jack books (and more others than I have space to mention) made a several excellent points in his Friday speech, two of which we should all heed. He has no problem with publishers passing up quality fiction in order to publish the flavor of the day. (Think Snooki from Jersey Shore, link to her book consciously not provided.) They have bills to pay. We all get that. What he can’t abide is how those same publishers present themselves as gatekeepers to save readers from “the tsunami of self-published trash,” when they are perfectly willing to print any level of trash if they think they can turn a profit with it. (Anyone remember Dennis Rodman’s book?)

Dana Kollman (Towson University) and John French (Baltimore Crime Scene Investigator) gave a fascinating and entertaining talk on what CSI shows get wrong. (Damn near everything.) I pride myself on knowing better than these shows, and still found a couple of things to fix in the work-in-progress; a major plot point in the next book also needs work. (John gave me a couple of suggestions I can use in place of what I’d thought was a good idea until he blew it up in my face.)

A sobering thought: when first started to use DNA in rape cases in rape cases, 20% of convictions were overturned. No one thought the rapes didn’t happen; they just got the wrong guy. Something for death penalty advocates to remember.

Among the most interesting things they’ve pulled fingerprints from: a feather, an egg, a tomato, and a gun that had been submerged for 25 years.

Heather Graham put the attendees of her master class to work writing their own story. She gave 15 minutes to come up with something that began with this sentence: The blood dripped slowly down the wall. The story had to include four characters: a cop, a firefighter, a stripper, and a model. Four adjectives also had to appear in conjunction with them: bald, peg-legged, tall, and hideous. Eight volunteers read what they came up with, and the end results ran the gamut from hard-boiled crime to vampires to comedy. (Anyone who missed Marge Phillips’s contribution is sorry, whether you know it or not.)

I shared a panel with Sandra Campbell and Weldon Burge to talk about plotting vs. pantsing. Weldon and I were avowed plotters; Sandra described herself as a plantser. (Half plotter, half pantser.) By the end of the panel we were all plantsers. So it goes. Not wanting to speak for anyone else, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Many thanks to Sandra and Weldon for a great time.

F. Paul Wilson’s master class was a recap of his career, used as an object lesson for what to do—and sometimes not do—with a writing career. Best story: when shifting genres to write Virgin (about the Virgin Mary retuning to Earth), he wrote under his wife’s name: Mary Elizabeth Murphy. (Can’t get much more Catholic than that.) The dedication read: To my beloved husband, without whom this book would not have been possible. When asked if she minded, he said no; she did all the signings and had a ball.

Great example of show vs. tell: Don’t say the man was cheap. Show him stealing the pennies from the tray at the convenience store. Wilson calls the first draft “the vomit draft,” and never edits until that’s finished. He also advocates short sentences and paragraphs, and provides a compelling reason: readers who get lost in a long, complex paragraph and have to retrace their steps are out of the story, which is always bad news.

There was, of course, much more. The opportunities to mingle were many, and we ruled the bar. I’m already signed up for next year, to be held at the Sheraton in Columbia MD. See you there.