# Conducting a Writing Panel: What to Cover?



## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

At Fur Fright this year I will be conducting a writing panel or two. So far I'm signing up to conducting "Writing Short Fiction", and debating whether I should add a "Writing Furry Fiction". 

So I'm here to ask for suggestions/advice on content of the panel. 

My plan is this: 90 minutes. One half devoted to "lecture"/discussion, one half devoted to Q&A. At some point an exercise. 

Topics: Story beginning, structure, characters, dialogue, description. My intention is to hit all of the highlights. And a few tiny words on publishing. 

I also plan on having resources on hand. A handout of book recommendations (books on writing I've found most useful), links to useful sites like http://www.furrywritersguild.com/; it has discussion of the furry market.


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## Jeevestheroo (Aug 9, 2010)

Personally, I don't believe that 'furry' fiction is so specialised that it needs a separate panel all of its own. The elements involved in writing a furry story, descriptiveness of physical characteristics, behaviours, etc, are just the same as they would be in any piece of fiction, just with a furry twist.  As for what to cover, I highly recommend taking at least a moment or two to address the issues of motivation and 'writer's block'. I've seen so many potential furry writers with one or two really promising stories in their gallery, then a journal that says "Writer's block... can't do anything..." and nothing more from them for months on end. It amazes me, since I've never suffered writer's block. So perhaps providing some tips and hints regarding self-motivation, ways to stimulate the imagination and break through the fear of the blank page, would be good.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 9, 2010)

A couple of things on character development and description in furry fiction that may be worth noting:
* When naming a character, remember that s/he probably had parents. What kind of parent would name their red fox child "Red" or "Blackpaw"? Nothing wrong with descriptive names, but they should describe something that's distinctive about the character. It's like naming your son "Boy".
* Look at photos of a species when you describe a member of that species for the first time. _Photos._ It's understandable that artists sometimes skip features that aren't considered distinctive of a species, but if for instance you mention a cat's whiskers, you probably also want to mention the ferret's. (My ferret actually has longer whiskers than my cats in absolute terms despite being smaller than them, go figure.) As a writer, you don't need every species to be iconic.

Another topic you may want to touch on at least briefly is editing/proofreading/polishing (I don't know what you'd want to call it). I may not be one to speak as much of my writing _is_ published straight off the text editor, but you're ruining the potential of your story if it's published with too many big errors and awkward sentences still in it. Proofreaders are good. At a minimum, use a spellchecker. And so on.


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## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

Jeevestheroo said:


> Personally, I don't believe that 'furry' fiction is so specialised that it needs a separate panel all of its own. The elements involved in writing a furry story, descriptiveness of physical characteristics, behaviours, etc, are just the same as they would be in any piece of fiction, just with a furry twist.


 The only reason why I'm thinking of separating it is because I anticipate furry specific issues to crop in like World building, describing, behavior, species choice, etc. 

And I have the feeling those will side track the brisk pace of the panel I'm looking at.

Especially when looking at the furry market vs. the general writing market, and getting attention wtihin the fandom too.


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## Jeevestheroo (Aug 9, 2010)

True. Though from my perspective, I see species choice as not at all different from choosing the race, gender, etc of a non-fur character. It can be just as important, or in some cases, irrelevent. Perhaps a point to raise is how vital the species is, when really the personality should be a more important focus regardless of the stereotypes people may associate with a story as soon as they hear someone say 'I've chosen two gay male foxes for this story...'.


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## sunandshadow (Aug 9, 2010)

Panels don't have time to include an exercise unless the exercise is the whole panel.  If you think the exercise is important, include it in the handouts so people can do it later.


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## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

Man this is so weird. 

On another writing forum for just normal writing, I'm being told that a panel that's just a Lecture is going to be Boring, that no one wants to sit there and just listen for 45+ minutes. That exercises will drive home the points that you want to make.

And every furry writing board I've been on has said exercises are not as useful for a panel.


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## M. LeRenard (Aug 9, 2010)

I think the folks on the non-furry board are right.  People don't remember things you tell them; they remember things they figure out for themselves.  So I wouldn't disregard the exercise.  I learned a while back in a psychology class that the average person has an attention span of about 20 minutes when listening to a lecture, so keep that in mind.  Unless you're really charismatic and energetic, the audience will get bored if you just stand there and drone through a PowerPoint presentation for 90 minutes.

Maybe what you could address regarding the furry aspect of it is the different levels of exploration you find in most furry writing.  You've got everything from humans in fur coats (he's a bird: that's all the difference you need to know) to writers who explore the deepest aspects of the other species and try to bring that alien psychology to the reader.  It gets a bit into the purpose of furry writing (why make them furry anyway?), as well as techniques for writing furry works that actually have mass appeal.


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## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

M. Le Renard said:


> It gets a bit into the purpose of furry writing (why make them furry anyway?)


 Typically a panel on writing furries must address this at some point. But considering MY opinion ont he matter, it won't be constructive. At least to the way that most people who talk about that view it.


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## sunandshadow (Aug 9, 2010)

I hang out at non-furry writing forums too - had you asked at absolutewrite or literotica's story forum I'd have said the same thing there.  Exercises are great in theory but there just isn't time in a 90 minute session to explain an exercise, wait for people to write something, read them aloud one at a time or in some other way study what was created, then let everyone comment on everyone else's work, and also fit some lecture in there.  I've attended a lot of con panels as well as college creative writing classes, and I'm saying that from my experience it's just impossible to fit a lecture, a writing exercise, and response to the exercise in a 90 minute session.  And an exercise which can be done and reacted to in less than 90 minutes is probably too basic to bother doing.

It's true that a session which is all lecture can be boring, I've attended some panels that pretty much put me to sleep.  Visual aids are nice but what visual aids are relevant to writing, a diagram of Freytag's triangle?  Probably most people have seen that already.  Personally I think it's the question and answer part that is the easiest to make worthwhile and interesting.  But the lecture is the part people will remember if you manage to actually tell them something useful they haven't heard before (and bonus points if you can present with a sense of humor or other kind of dramatic flair).


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## Warnndog (Aug 9, 2010)

I had to conduct a Writing panel once, I didn't really have much choice in the subject matter .  Either way, I say it really depends on what you feel is most important in writing. What advice do you want to give to fledgling writers. 

That's what I would focus on.


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## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

The exercise I had in mind was actually very short. 

"Write six lines of dialogue. Try to inform us the most about what's going on (conflict, setting, characters) without bluntly saying 'I hate being in this warehouse'." 

Three people get asked to read theirs aloud.

My intention is to highlight flaws that crop up in dialogue. The adverb love. '"I hate your guts", he snarled.' "Where are we?" he said confusedly'. And other dialogue follies.


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## Rechan (Aug 9, 2010)

> Visual aids are nice but what visual aids are relevant to writing


I plan on showing a picture of three < placed in such a manner that it looks like the three corners of a triangle. The point is that you can see the triangle there, without all the details. So all you need to do is describe just enough to give them an outline, or give them the unique stuff, and the reader will fill in the blanks for themselves. 

Perhaps I could use just parts of the details of a face. Although it's harder to imagine how to _draw_ that to get the info across.

The other visual aid will be a smiley face, and then a smiley face with a scar or a mole or perhaps buck teeth. The normal smiley face is the equivalent of saying, "He was a red fox'. We've all seen red foxes, what makes this one unique? The smiley face with the characteristic represents, "He was a red fox with a piece of his ear missing". This is going to make the reader picture your character because of his uniqueness without overloading him with details.

Both of these are to illustrate lean but functional description.


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## M. LeRenard (Aug 10, 2010)

Rechan said:


> Typically a panel on writing furries must address this at some point. But considering MY opinion ont he matter, it won't be constructive. At least to the way that most people who talk about that view it.


 
A different perspective is generally a welcome thing, and in that way it certainly could be constructive.  Depends on how you address it.

As far as exercises go, I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who's both given and received scientific lectures, so I might be wrong about how it pertains to a presentation on writing.  But I do know that people learn better and faster when asked to participate in some concrete way, besides just taking notes.


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## jinxtigr (Aug 10, 2010)

Rechan said:


> I plan on showing a picture of three < placed in such a manner that it looks like the three corners of a triangle. The point is that you can see the triangle there, without all the details. So all you need to do is describe just enough to give them an outline, or give them the unique stuff, and the reader will fill in the blanks for themselves.


 
I'm not sure you can START out that way, though. It's more like...if you're cartooning and drawing eyes, they can be roundy shapes or they can have sort of intersections, where the basically round shape breaks and does a reverse curve. I could probably explain this better in a lecture, if I had a whiteboard or paper to draw on... you can have a bulge coming up from beneath that's a sneer or squint or the effect of a smile, or an intersection from above that's a scowl. They're just intersections with the eye shape, but they're the evidence of things unseen (cheek, brow etc).

Negative space is not the absence of information. The stuff you don't tell about a character is not the stuff that's undecided. It can cast a heavy shadow over what's shown, distort it incredibly, but EVEN MORE than the stuff that's shown, you have to know the exact shape of it to depict how it affects your lines.

Take that fox- what about 'He was a red fox and his ears were always laid back'. Add (because a guy sneaks up at some time every day and whacks him in the back of the head, then disappears before the fox can see him), and don't tell the reader that. Don't you know a lot more about how this fox must be now? (poor guy!) You just filled in a huge amount of negative space. The unsaid things can be really big and really simple as long as they tell you a lot...


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## Klisoura (Aug 10, 2010)

Jeevestheroo said:


> Personally, I don't believe that 'furry' fiction is so specialised that it needs a separate panel all of its own.



I emphatically disagree, for two reasonsâ€”one the special nature of furry writ_ing_, and the other the nature of furry writ_ers_. Firstly, while I don't agree that anthropomorphism in every facet of writing is _required_ for a story to be "furry" per se, there are virtually no aspects that could not, if desired, take _some_ degree of anthropomorphisationâ€”from speech patterns to behaviour to character names. Again, I would absolutely disagree that this is necessary, but there are enough people that desire it that you could definitely fill up a writing panel. Or ten.

Perplexingly, as a fandom we seem to have allowed "furry fiction" to become bounded not by its defining elements (which we should wish to use, if we wish to use them, not because they are compulsory but because they are tremendously powerful) but by _what furries themselves will read_. I would venture to say that this is one reason why anthro fiction remains in its little ghettoâ€”I daresay that I don't think that Larry Niven, Cordwainer Smith, or Frederik Pohl would treat 'furry' the same way we do. Treating 'furry' as a panel topic also gives the opportunity to present a middle ground between the teleological view of people Conway, who argue that fiction must be intrinsically furry, and people who treat furriness as essentially irrelevant to character development (*cough* Like me).

Secondly, unlike normal fiction there are decidedly limited venues for aspiring furry authors to get their work known and to get feedback on it. Offhand I'd say there are really only two, FurAffinity and Yiffstar-cum-SoFurry, both of which have taken Sturgeon's Law, shrugged their shoulders, and said "come on in! Proofreading optional! ^.^" 

The result is that the majority of furry authors, having grown up without rigorous formal instruction and in a world of Twitter and the blogosphere, are at best below average and at worst simply terrible. Since there is also no current of criticism, self or external, this also means that nobody gets better. Writing panels form a unique opportunity for people who do wish to improve to work together at doing so, and for those who do not to at least recognise that, somewhere at least, there are standards.

You would be inclined to say that people who are not very good would simply choose not to go to panels, but in my experience I find this to be untrue. Having come to believe that they are capital-a Authors, they _do_ attend, and while it's possibly they simply shut everything out, we might as well try. Touching on the furry nature of writing specifically tends to ground panels a bit by making them more immediately relevantâ€”I think. Or hope.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 10, 2010)

Klisoura said:


> Offhand I'd say there are really only two, FurAffinity and Yiffstar-cum-SoFurry, both of which have taken Sturgeon's Law, shrugged their shoulders, and said "come on in! Proofreading optional! ^.^"
> 
> The result is that the majority of furry authors, having grown up without rigorous formal instruction and in a world of Twitter and the blogosphere, are at best below average and at worst simply terrible. Since there is also no current of criticism, self or external, this also means that nobody gets better.



For reference, though it may only be tangentially on topic here, I'll mention that FurRag has a vastly better story/story-browsing interface than both of the "big name" gallery-oh-and-we-do-writing-too-btw sites you mentioned, _and_ tends to get "better" comments. The userbase isn't as big, but the members who use it and comment are in my experience more likely to provide constructive critisism (as opposed to asspats) than, say, Yiffstar's commenters. (For all I know the commenting public may have changed slightly since the site became SoFurry; I stopped posting to the archive before the switchover.)


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## Klisoura (Aug 10, 2010)

I love FurRag to death, don't get me wrong. I also had the incredibly good fortune to bother Quinn Yellowfox for several hours Saturday (he made two mistakes, the first in coming to my panel and the second in letting me corner him XD), who reinforced the fact that FurRag's commenters are substantially more on-point than those elsewhere (where, at Yiffstar for instance, authors are empowered to delete comments they do not like, and do so with relish, I have found). However, in a panel of perhaps 15 or 20 people he was I think the only FurRag member besides myself, and I think in general panelists will find that their attendees are most used to Yiffstar or FA, unfortunately.


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## Jeevestheroo (Aug 10, 2010)

Klisoura said:


> I emphatically disagree...



Y'know, fair play. Looking at it from your point of view, I stand heavily corrected!


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## Fenrari (Aug 10, 2010)

I'd be interested in helping, but there is no way I'll be able to attend the final product.

On that note, make sure to cover the importance of using the senses when writing furry (murry ) fiction. As arguably it's one of the most defining features in our genre.


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## jinxtigr (Aug 12, 2010)

Seriously. A hawk's attention is drawn to the tiniest distant details or movements. We know that can be a furry species-specific superpower, but how often do people ask, 'what must that be like for the hawk'? Never mind the plot points of what that character can do, what does it FEEL LIKE to do?


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