How To Be A Panelist: The Panel Recap

I should probably write a bit about the panel I was on yesterday at Harvard, "How To Launch A Writing Career While You're In Law School."

1. The other panelists were really cool, and it was nice to meet them, and to talk about writing a little bit.  Here are Amazon links to their books: Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club (and the upcoming The Poe Shadow), Murad Kalam's Night Journey, and Lauren Willig's The Masque of the Black Tulip.  Probably, from my perspective, talking to them before and after the panel was more fun than the panel itself, but hopefully the audience had a different perspective.

2. I was pleasantly surprised that being on a panel involves less talking than I feared it would.  Besides the 5 minutes we all were told to be ready to say, about why we got to be panelists instead of audience members, there wasn't that much.  Some people asked questions, I think there were 3 or 4 questions that all of us answered, but nothing that required a particularly long response, and it was, well, a little easier than I feared it might be.  That's not to say I was terribly articulate, but I think I was fine, and if I do more things like this, I expect it's actually not that hard to develop some standard paragraphs that get a good response, and make this stuff pretty easy.  It's like stand-up comedy, except you're allowed to be boring, inarticulate, and you can sit down while you talk.  Those are big "except"s.  I guess it's nothing like stand-up comedy.

3. Most of the panel time ended up being about the mechanics of the "launch" part of the title -- how each of us ended up getting to write books.  That was where the title was directed, and so that's what we talked about, and that's what most of the questions were about.  My story was unusual in a couple of respects -- ex: agent found me instead of me finding agent, and I sold the book before it was written, as opposed to selling a completed manuscript like the way most fiction is sold -- but the most critical difference (and I didn't really think about this until halfway through the panel) is that the other three panelists write about things that have nothing to do with law school and the law, whereas my book is exactly about the kinds of things that I experienced in law school, even if it's still fiction.  So while their advice had to necessarily involve a balancing of time, and needing to carve out a section of your world that lets you deal with your book and not with law school, to write what I wrote involves some other kind of energy that's probably easier to find while in law school.  Not that one thing is in any way better or worse than the other, but it's probably pretty different to write a historical romance novel while in law school than to write a book satirizing legal culture while in law school.

4. I think it's probably very easy, as a panelist, to get sucked into posing as an expert when talking about something you're not necessarily an expert in.  Someone asks a question, and you're up there, and you're supposed to have an answer... but your answer may not be any better than anyone else's answer in the audience.  I don't think we had any of this at the panel yesterday, but I could feel it as a trap it would be very easy to fall into.  If an audience member had described some symptoms and asked me if I thought she had cancer, there's certainly the inclination to answer the question, even though I don't have any idea.  But no one wants to say "I don't know" when you're on a panel.  I expect professors find this same temptation.  I think a lot of them succumb.

5. What the panel didn't spend much time on -- no questions were asked about it! -- was the actual craft of writing.  At dinner, we talked more about writing and being a writer and stuff like that, just the panelists.  That was more interesting to me, but I probably wasn't the target audience.

6. My takeaway from the panel was that the #1 message from all of us is that you can write while you're a law student, and if you write good stuff, it's possible for good things to happen.  So if you want to write, you should figure out a way to do that, and make it a priority, and know that it's absolutely possible to balance it with law school. 

7. That's fine advice, I suppose, but part of me has a really unfair reaction to that.  Writers write.  If you need someone telling you it's okay to write while you're in law school, and you haven't been writing on your own, and you're not sure whether you have time to write... maybe that's okay.  I expect most writers write because they're inspired to write.  If you're not inspired to write what you're writing, it probably won't come out sounding very, well, inspired.  I'm not sure I'm looking to read uninspired writing.  If you need panelists to tell you it's okay to write... that doesn't excite me.  That's probably really unfair.  Someone can probably convince me I'm wrong about this somehow.

If you were at the panel, did you find it useful?  I'm curious.  I think we were okay panelists, some of the others more so than me.  And I guess it's useful to hear how writers got their book deals.  Most panels when I was a student were pretty boring.  Hopefully this one was less boring.  :)  All in all, I was happy to be invited and I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I got to meet the other panelists, and I do think it's good that the law school is trying to do things like this, and show people there are other careers out there that people can pursue.

Comments

[PG]

#7 isn't unfair, but I think it assumes a confidence that the target audience for the panel might lack. Considering how we're told before law school that it's going to take all our time (I'm reminded of the person mentioned on a blog, either Stay of Execution or 3YoH, who didn't think there was spare time to be in a relationship in law school), the belief that one shouldn't "waste" time writing is easy to have. It's probably particularly easy for people who are really intense about doing as well as they can in school (i.e. people unlike me).

People also come to the compulsion to write in different ways and at different times in their lives. I didn't write voluntarily until I was in high school (when I wrote many first chapters of romance novels and no nonfiction), and I didn't feel *compelled* to write until I graduated from college and realized that I missed writing my weekly opinion column (which had habituated me to think of something to say on a regular basis), so I started blogging. Except for one blog post a couple years ago in response to a newspaper column, I haven't written a line of fiction since a short story in fall 2001 and some scenes for a playwriting class the following semester.

[Andrea]

It was a little too-novel focused, but that wasn't your fault, they invited 4 novelists. (Right now I only write short stories, that other girl was asking about nonfiction and everyone had no idea what her question was. And you don't get started in the short fiction or article markets by getting an agent.)

I agree with the above commenter. People are really on the edge with their self-confidence at HLS, even when they weren't like that before. People need people to tell them they don't have to do the law review competitition even when they know they would hate it. People do OCI because everyone else is. Very herd-like. And creative writing isn't what the herd is doing. So people do need assurance, and more importantly, to see someone actually did it.

My favorite take-away from the panel was actually seeing the different personalities up there - everyone was sort of weird in his own way, and I like being reminded of the existence of slightly weird people in law school as much as possible. You had dramatic bubbly romance woman, kind of goofy earnest blog guy, intense deep literary novel dude, and bad facial hair nerdy mystery guy. I enjoyed that very much.