The Writing Industries Conference was great.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never before met so many writers in one place and in spite of lots of news of the demise of print in recent months the attitudes were mostly positive.<\/p>\n
Although I\u2019ve been to a number of games conferences and shows \u2013 some are huge events with thousands of people attending \u2013 this was the first time I\u2019ve ever been to a more general writing event of this nature.\u00a0 So to be invited to act as a panellist and give a short workshop was a great honour.<\/p>\n
One of the things I love about sitting on panels or giving talks or, in this case, doing a workshop, is that it focuses my ideas and helps me to clarify my own thinking in certain matters.\u00a0 I also get to learn a lot, both from fellow panellists and from the questions that people ask.<\/p>\n
Questions are a vital part of a conference and certainly an important way for me to discover what it is that people \u2013 other writers \u2013 want to learn.\u00a0 It can often be difficult to work out what they don\u2019t know without them asking questions.\u00a0 Game writing has lots of things in common with writing for other media, but it\u2019s the differences that people don\u2019t see or have no knowledge of that is important and I hope my workshop at least gave a few pointers in this respect.\u00a0 In a half hour workshop I was only able to scratch the surface.<\/p>\n
The keynote speech to the event was given by Graham Joyce \u2013 a novelist who writes with a very unique voice and who has won a number of important awards over the years.\u00a0 Although he willingly admits that the printed page is likely to come to an end \u2013 or be vastly reduced \u2013 he was actually very positive and encouraged writers to think beyond a narrow writing field and consider other areas, too.\u00a0 He also touched on the idea that writers should not only be aware of new media, they should embrace it as both a possible outlet for their writing and a way of marketing themselves.<\/p>\n
The panels I looked in on were interesting and gave an insight into other aspects of more traditional publishing, but also showed how e-books are becoming a real force to be reckoned with.\u00a0 I think it was Richard Birkin who said that tools will soon be available that will allow authors to deliver their work in e-book form themselves and the possibility of cutting out the publisher altogether is becoming closer to reality all the time.<\/p>\n
The biggest things I took away from the conference were:<\/p>\n
The Writing Industries Conference was great. I\u2019ve never before met so many writers in one place and in spite of lots of news of the demise of print in recent months the attitudes were mostly positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,3],"tags":[13,256],"class_list":["post-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences-and-shows","category-writing","tag-conferences","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":630,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions\/630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}