An Introvert at a Conference of Introverts

by Sharon Kayne

I am not what you’d call a ‘conference person.’ It’s probably mostly because I’m an introvert and conferences entail talking to lots of strangers. Also, I’m always ready to doubt myself, and a conference—where you’re around lots of people that you’re gonna compare yourself to—is a great opportunity to second-guess your value as a human. In my last job, I attended several conferences. I hated them. I’d leave the conference feeling like my colleagues across the nation were way better at their jobs than me because they were doing all these new and exciting things. I also always left with the feeling that I needed to learn how to do all of these new and exciting things and, honestly, I barely had enough time to do all the work I was already doing.

So, when I heard that Romance Writers of America was bringing their annual conference to my home town, I was certain I would avoid it entirely. I feared that the introversion and self-doubt would flatten me, since I was already feeling pretty much like a failure as an indie author.

I would venture to guess that most writers are introverts. I mean, writing an 80,000-word book means spending a long time at your computer with only a bunch of fictious people for company, and I think that would drive most extroverts crazy. So, it occurred to me that this would be a conference of mostly introverts. Would we just sit around in silence waiting for someone else to say something first? At any rate, it didn’t sound like lots of fun.

And then I remembered that a friend of mine met an editor at a writer’s conference, which led to two of her children’s books being published. So, I sucked it up and registered, then signed up for a pitch session with a publisher. Up to now, I’ve gotten nothing but rejections from publishers, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up about this pitch. I figured, if nothing else, getting an immediate, face-to-face rejection would be better than the usual rejections, which take months to arrive and are the same boilerplate emails they send to everyone they reject. It might be a breath of fresh air. Fortunately, I was wrong.

But before I go into my pitch, I want to say that during the conference I only had occasional feelings of self-doubt. In fact, I got really excited about what I learned at one session, even though part of what I learned was what I’d been doing all wrong. The session was on writing a book synopsis, which I find to be a grueling and painful process (falling somewhere between the terror of querying a publisher and the mind-numbing minutia of going over your tax documents every year). Sure, I could feed my manuscript into some AI program and have it spit out a synopsis for me, but as I’ve written before, I think AI is overblown and under-useful. Plus, I don’t want to share my work with the AI collective. Let it “learn” how to plagiarize from some other schmuck.

My problem, as I came to learn in this session, was that I’d been writing my synopses like book reports. I was so busy listing all the plot points, that I failed entirely to put in any of the character arcs. Oddly enough, I left that session feeling hopeful rather than beating myself up for having been doing it so badly. It probably helped that I had just had my pitch session and not only was the editor very nice, but she also asked me to email my manuscript to her. Granted, it’s possible that she said that to everyone who pitched, but it was better than being told, “Thanks but no thanks.” So, with my new-found clarity on synopsis writing, I went home, revamped my synopsis—it’s significantly better now, if I may say so myself—and submitted it with my manuscript.

I’m trying not to get overly hopeful about this submission. After all, I’ve never gotten anything but rejection from a publisher before, so that could happen again. Sadly, with this conference under my belt, I’m now wondering how much all of those rejections had to do with my lousy synopses.

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Buy my historical romances, This Restless Sea, The Green Silk Gown, and Variations on a Romance, at Amazon.