Tales of the Writing Trade by Top Storytellers Lure 120 to Conference

As the author of 17 novels, Joan Dial is well aware of the importance of helping to promote a book once it hits the bookstores.

So when she was asked to talk about her 1984 World War II novel, “Echoes of War,” she eagerly accepted. It was only after she had agreed to talk, Dial recalls, that she realized it would be to a group of World War II veterans--men who had actually lived through the battles she had only researched.

Worried that her audience would find holes in what she had written, she arrived at the meeting hall early. As she paced back and forth hoping the floor would swallow her up, a man walked in.

“You’re Joan Dial,” he said, eyeing the anxious author. “Are you nervous?”

Dial said, “No, no, no.”

And the man said: “So what are you doing in the men’s room?”

And so the stories went at the fourth annual Writer’s Conference sponsored by the Chapman College English department.

But a chance to hear firsthand tales of the writing trade is only part of what drew 120 writers and would-be writers to the college campus in Orange last weekend to listen to Dial and a dozen other authors and publishing representatives.

For $45, the Friday evening and all-day Saturday conference included a lavish buffet lunch and a chance for participants to mingle with the attendant literary elite at a wine and cheese reception at the end of the final session, a reading by Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”) of a just-completed short story destined for the pages of The New Yorker.

But what the conference fee really paid for was a heaping serving of literary food for thought--everything from the nuts and bolts of submitting fiction to New York publishers (from veteran writing instructor Pat Kubis) to how to break into Hollywood (from “Dead Heat” screenwriter Terry Black).

Along the way, participants also heard from fantasy writer James Blaylock, English mystery writer Elizabeth George, Oscar-winning writer-director Abby Mann, literary agent Ben Kamsler, literary attorney Louise Healey, bookstore owner Lorraine Zimmerman and Delacorte book representative Susan Lewis.

As conference coordinator Robert Ray said at the outset of the Saturday morning session, he was 43 before he attended his first writers’ workshop. Since then, Ray, 53, whose latest Matt Murdock mystery, “Dial ‘M’ for Murdock,” hit bookstores this month, has had six novels published. But until that first writing workshop, the Irvine resident told the crowd, he thought he knew it all.

“It’s really amazing the kinds of things you pick up at things like this,” said Ray, who teaches fiction writing at Chapman. “Maybe it’s only one idea, but it can save your life.”

Indeed, as at all such gatherings, participants were ever hopeful to pick up a helpful trick of the trade or to find words of inspiration that will carry them on to writing success.

Herewith are highlights of that shared wisdom:

Terry Black, a self-described “undisciplined, lazy, irresponsible person,” on the discipline required to be a writer: “The reason I’m able to write is because it’s fun for me; it’s not work. I have the world’s best job (as a full-time writer), and you can too. But I think you can’t let your impulse to be too perfect, to be too exact and precise get in the way of just having a good time.”

Black on finding the time to write while holding down a full-time job: “You have to find a time so you can (write)--and keep writing on a regular schedule--without either dropping it because it’s too much work or going mad. I think if you try and write in every available free moment, you will literally go crazy and drop it. I think what you need to do is have time for recreation and goofing off and watching stupid TV shows and whatever it is you do, but what I recommend and what I used to do is (think) Monday is my writing night. After I get off work, I’ll go home and I won’t do anything else on Monday except write. Because of that, Tuesday is my goof-off night; I’ll do whatever I feel like on Tuesday. . . . On the weekend I would try and say ‘I’ll work on Saturday and take off on Sunday,’ or vice versa. The point is you give yourself a system of rewards. It keeps you going, so you have some fun and you have some progress also.”

Michael Chabon, whose thesis for the UC Irvine Writing Program became his first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” when asked whether graduate writing programs are “worth it”: “I can answer that: I got my book published. So, from that perspective, it was worth it.”

Chabon on authors he has read who have helped him in his own writing: “Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust . . . a lot. Everything I’ve read has helped in some way. Even those (novels that resulted in his saying), ‘Nope, I don’t want to write like that.’ My favorite writer is John Cheever. He’s the best American short story writer ever.”

Writer-director Abby Mann, whose screenplays have tackled such controversial subjects as the Nazi war crimes trials (“Judgment at Nuremberg”) and mentally retarded children (“A Child Is Waiting”), on his advice to beginning writers: “The biggest thing I can tell you about writing--there are really three main things--subject matter, subject matter, subject matter.”

Mann on the importance of presenting both sides of a controversial subject in writing: “I think Shaw said it very well: ‘A play is no stronger than its antagonist.’ You have to give the opposite side its full due . . . because once you give everybody their due, you encourage people to think. . . .”

Joan Dial on what the book editors want: “Editors want the same thing the readers want: They want to be captivated, to be intrigued by your characters in your story. (At a writers conference in San Diego last January) as it turned out, my editor from Bantam was there and she told the group that she loved the ‘what if?’ type of novel. And this was the reason that Bantam had bid for my novel ‘Untamed.’ They bid against five other houses in an auction, and she said she knew as soon as she read the opening chapter that she had to have this novel. The premise--not that original, really--but it was ‘what if’ an English woman is captured by the Apaches, spends 16 years as the wife of a Chiricahua chief and then when the Apaches are shipped off to the reservation decides to return to her English husband with a 16-year-old Apache son. . . .”

Agent Ben Kamsler on the difficulty of selling book manuscripts: “You have to find out what sort of material is selling on the market today. I’ve got a nonfiction book, which I sold, and it just came on the market in September, called ‘How to Succeed Through the Coming Depression.’ When I read it, I said, ‘I know this is going to be a big seller because we are going to have a depression’ and sure enough the book is now in its third printing. There’s always a market for something current and viable.”

Pat Kubis on fiction that sells: “A believable hero or heroine with a believable problem gets a believable check.”

Elizabeth George on her philosophy of writing: “I really feel that it’s so important that you write what gives you joy and that you write about what you’re interested in and that you write about what you love. My belief is if you do that, your work is going to have natural integrity and it is going to sell.”