Kill the Baby: A Recap of My Experience at SCBWI's 40th Summer Conference

The very first word that comes to mind when I think back on this last weekend in LA at The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators 40th Summer Conference ought to be "life-changing" or "inspirational." In truth, it's "exhausting." Oh, it was life-changing and inspirational too. But all those inspiring and life-changing moments really take a lot out of a girl!

I met a new friend, Liliana Erasmus (from Aruba!) simply by replying to her tweet asking where everyone was having dinner. A couple of mojitos later, we walk into the lobby and Liliana gasps, "I think that's Judy Blume!" We consult my iPhone for Google Images confirmation and then she grabs my elbow and drags me over to Ms. Blume. I blubbered (pun intended) something about how I would not be the woman I am today, would not be here without her and Ms. Blume proceeds to give me one of those high-fives where you link fingers with the person and sort of shake hands. Life-changing and inspirational, check. And this was the night before the conference officially began.

The conference itself was full of inspirational bon mots from the royalty of our business (paraphrased where my note-taking failed me):

• Bruce Coville: Scare yourself. Be fearless. Courage is freedom. Take risks.
• Bruce Coville: Stop scaring yourself if you are scaring yourself into not working on your book.
• Bruce Coville: Learn to take a compliment (on Sunday he confessed he'd wished he hadn't mentioned this at the beginning of the conference because people had been testing him on it all weekend)
• Libba Bray: Writing is scary. Bad writing is a form of self-protection.
• Libba Bray: Perfect wants to vote you off the island, Better wants to form an alliance. (As an aside, Libba Bray is one of the funniest people alive. Check out her video for Going Bovine)
• Donna Jo Napoli: "I write what I need to write."
• Donna Jo Napoli: Society is built on empathy. If terrible things happen to you, you learn empathy. But children can also learn empathy by reading about horrible things happening to characters in books.
• Donna Jo Napoli: Write from places of joy, places of fear and places of pain.
• Judy Blume: Get that draft done! Write straight through.
• Judy Blume: Determination as much as any kind of talent -- that's what's going to get you there.
• Judy Blume: The first draft is finding the pieces of the puzzle. You put the puzzle together with revising.
• Norton Juster: Boredom is an undervalued resource. We create when we are bored.

I met another new friend, Julia Kelly, a writer/illustrator, on Friday night. I was sitting alone at the lobby bar, hoping to run in to one of the friends I'd made the night before. There was a chair free at my table and seating was limited, so she asked if she could sit with me. Naturally, we got to talking about what we were doing at the conference. After discussing my novel and sharing the pain of the one-on-one critique of the first 10 pages that I had survived earlier in the day, she sat back in her chair and drawled, "Oh. You have to kill the baby."

"Kill the baby?" I asked and wondered for a moment if I really should go inviting strangers to share my table.

"Yeah, it's time to walk away from it. Put it in the drawer for 8 or 9 months. Work on something else. Maybe when you go back to it you'll see exactly what's wrong with it and how to fix it. Or maybe you'll see it's not worth the effort. But you've got to kill the baby."

I thought about her words. A lot. I discussed it with another of my new friends, Jim Hill. He nodded solemnly. "Yep. Kill the baby."

The next day I was furiously taking notes during the panel of four agents discussing the current state of the children's book market (side note, Tracey Adams of Adams Literary was every bit as cool as Quinlan Lee whom I gushed over in my blog entry A Writer's Crush). I turned to a blank page and instead of continuing my notes I drew a tombstone. I wrote in the stereotypical R. I. P. and below that the name of my novel.

I killed the baby.

And it felt good. Mostly.

I am now working on a whole new concept: MG or YA contemporary fiction/suspense novel. I'm scared. But you know, Bruce Coville says that's a good thing.