This past weekend I attended the 4th Street Fantasy Convention, and these are my notes about what I found useful and interesting and what thoughts and ideas I had that were sparked from these panels:
* One-night Stand vs. Round Two
* Children's and YA Fantasy: Not Just for Kids


(Thanks to timprov for letting me play with his camera!)



One-night Stand vs. Round Two

Most characters have one ideal plot to "rack" (in both senses of the word) them on, a quintessential story--if you make a more protean character, you can have more books out of them, depending on how much you're willing to let them change.

Series novels tend to have either a) a changeable character, or b) the same character confronting repeated challenges (cozy mysteries are of this type). Type b) may be more satisfying for fans looking for more of the same but less satisfying for the author.

Keep in a certain amount of chaff (characters, trivia, details) that feels like it may be important even if not in this book. The subconscious occasionally knows what its doing.

9 character-entities is generally considered the upper limit of characters a reader can track in one book.

Readers tend to get attached to characters, not worlds. (Really?)

Super-popular characters may have the following characteristics: 1) they may have a lot of latitude within the world and be able to move freely or act in unconventional ways, 2) they may be transgressive truth-tellers, and/or 3) they may have boatloads of charisma and the ability to inspire people to want to know what they're going to do next.

Lower status or other situation leading to a character with less to lose may enable the transgressive truth-teller.

Writing technique: Lack of response becomes a response when framed by the responses of other characters. (Variation on the "remove the elephant and leave the shape" technique.)

Picking an overall structure for a series may help the ability to satisfactorily wrap up a series. A story arc over x books, a book for each character that's part of x, or maybe a book for each of x artifacts-of-world.

Avoid an implied "z will be the end" where we never get to z, e.g. the end of Voyager would be getting home (which did end).



Children's and YA Fantasy: Not Just for Kids

YA can be lighter, more humorous. Authors are allowed to have fun with it.

There is more freedom from genre boundaries and conventions.

Bibliotherapy, when done right, is entertaining/good writing that can also give you what you need for x crisis. It must have resolution. In the bad form, it can appear as "problem" novels.

In problem novels, the problem (pregnancy, drug use, divorce, etc.) is the universe of the story, not a problem in the universe, and too often is closed by a heavy-handed moral.

Adults bring a freight of expectations to their reading. Kids don't. Something may be terrifying to an adult who has other context from life or adult genre novels, but only mildly scary to a kid. (Neat.)

Need to remember that YA readers don't know all the SF/F conventions, so need to provide more explanation to allow an entry point.

Twilight - Books can be kind of porny yet lacking in actual sex if they kind of set up the reader to continue the naughty fantasy on their own. This one also hits the old-school Gothic notes.

I think robots could be the next vampires, story-wise. This is something I may expound upon at great length later.

Remember that YA readers are frequently trying to explore or understand the world-that-is.