Tim Travaglini: Keynote Speker

Tim Travaglini is an editor from putnum, and he looks surprisingly familiar. I don't know where I would have seen him before. He's wearing a bow tie, which is pretty dang cool. Tim's comments are in regular text, my 2 cents are in italics.

Tim is talking about getting out of the slush pile. He says there is no easy way to do this, or rather no guaranteed way. He mentioned a recent Newberry award winner who had 400 rejection letters. This kind of news always cheers everybody up in the room. If a newberry award winner has to go through 400 rejection letters, where does that leave the rest of us poor suckers?

Statistically speaking, none of you are going to be published by the end of today. Rats! I want my money back.

Three components to success.

1. Natural Talent
2. Training
3. Persistence
   

See, something like that scares me. I don't know if I have the first one, I know I haven't got the second one, and as for the third one...I'm bored with this sentence, I'm stopping.

Tim says that if you have two of these, you're good to go. If you're really good, and have good training, you might be laxy and still succeed. Or if you have no talent, but you have a good trainer, and are persistent, you might still succeed.

If you want to write, you have to read. And read. And read and read. You can't skip out on this step. If you don't read, you won't be able to write.

Writing is a masochistic pursuit. Isn't that the truth!