Thrillerfest--Not Your Same Old Conference

Thrillerfest 08

Or--

Now for Something Completely Different

Elaine Grant

Last week I attended the International Thriller Writers annual conference Thrillerfest 08 in New York City. Since, as my critique partners well know, I’ve been working on a thriller for years now, I wanted to test the waters and widen my circle of acquaintances in that genre.

This is not your same old rodeo, as they say--especially if you’ve only attended romance conferences, as I had. In contrast to Romance Writers of America, which welcomes non-published as well as published writers, ITW only accepts authors published by an ITW recognized publisher.

The first thing I noticed at this conference was a LOT more men in attendance. In fact maybe more men than women. Testosterone was palpable in this spy-murder-special forces-chiller-thriller atmosphere. Conference workshops targeted more technical issues of writing and researching thrillers and suspense, including demonstrations on hand-to-hand combat; lethal weapons, bombs and terrorism from The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms; the writer-publisher relationship; what makes a great villain; writing international thrillers; military action thrillers; crime scene profiling; how to get noticed by reviewers. There were too many to mention here, but a full schedule is available on the website.

Also, there were a lot of open-discussion panels with major thriller authors, agents, and editors discussing relevant topics. Noticeably absent (by me anyway) were any workshops on love scenes, although the paranormal element was represented by Heather Graham, Michelle Gagnon and others.

A separate mini-conference called CraftFest dealt more with the craft of writing. Topics included basic mistakes of beginning writers; the six biggest mistakes that even best-selling writers make; how to storyboard; ways to amp up your thriller (given by James Patterson!); atmosphere and dialog by Heather Graham; and many, many more. With three presentations going on simultaneously every hour, it was hard to pick and choose. Another fun and different activity was AgentFest, Speed Dating with Literary Agents. All of the participating agents were seated at tables in a ballroom and authors seeking agents lined up for a version of the popular speed-dating phenomenon. The authors had made a list of their preferred agents, and were able to pitch to each one for three minutes before moving on to the next. To pare a novel and pertinent personal information down to a three minute presentation is a daunting task that had quite a few authors sweating bullets beforehand.

Since my husband and I also wanted to visit our son, who’s working in the city this summer, I split my time between the conference in the daytime and spending time with him in the evenings, and also opted out of all of Saturday’s activities. I still managed to make the Thrillerfest cocktail party on Friday night and that’s an event I won’t miss next year, for sure. After a couple of glasses of wine, everybody’s friendly and talkative. I chatted with a man and his wife for awhile and mentioned I was struggling with some plot elements of my thriller. He immediately began to give me advice on plotting and when the noise level in the room became intrusive, led the way outside to an alcove where he jotted off a graph on the back of his business card and gave a bare-bones explanation. By the way, the man was David Hagberg, NY Times best-selling author. www.david-hagberg.com . Advice from the best!

I did find a few familiar faces from RWA conventions who write romantic suspense, but overall the conference was totally different from any I’ve attended. I plan to go back next year, hopefully with a full manuscript in hand that I can promote and I will definitely take better advantage of a thrilling conference.