Writers Conference Number Umpteen and One

This one was The 2025 Boston Writing Workshop. It was billed as a “How to Get Published” writing event, with the opportunity to pitch a book face-to-face with live agents.

Halfway through the morning, I was sitting there thinking, yeah, I’ve been to enough of these now. It didn’t hurt to review all of the standard advice, but I wasn’t hearing anything new.

But the afternoon…that was worth going to! I’ve always been a bit vague on the difference between the story outline you give in a query letter and the synopsis that some agents ask for as well. I’ve often felt like I was repeating myself.

But no, I get it now. The query should be much pithier: Give them the protagonist, the primary conflict, and the stakes. Don’t snow them under with multiple characters’ names (and especially not with made-up place names in a fantasy world). No more than seven to ten sentences. Give them a taste, enough to tease their interest, but LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE.

Faced with a ten minute slot to pitch Waterlily to an agent, I sat down with my query letter as it stood. I numbered the sentences, highlighted the most important points, and crossed some things out. Then more things. Then more.

I was pretty relaxed walking into the pitch sessions. I spoke to two agents, and both of them said they wanted to see a few opening pages. At the end of the first session, I asked for feedback on my pitch. She said I’d given her a lot of detail at the beginning and summed up at the end, and I should do it the other way around. Lead with protagonist, conflict, and stakes, and then get into talking about flying ships and Taoist monks. It was that same advice I’d heard earlier about keeping it pithy, but now I was getting it in real time. I took her advice going into the second session, and this time the agent spontaneously complemented me on a good presentation.

Here's what was weird: I enjoyed making the pitches. I haven’t spoken to an agent face-to-face since my very first writers’ conference in 2017, and back then it was an ordeal. Even the positive responses (and they were almost all positive) left me feeling emotionally bruised.

I’ll take this as a measure of how much I’ve matured in eight years.