It was that time of year, when we “genre” geeks got awesome for AwesomeCon! The Washington, D.C. area convention featured celebrity guests Karen Gillan, WWE Superstar Seth Rollins, and William Shatner just to name a few. And that made us doubly excited that our very own Harrison Demchick was invited to speak at the three-day event, which included opportunities to get autographs and interact with the celebrity guests as well as interesting and informative panel discussions, and so much more. AwesomeCon was held May 29-31, 2015 at The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C.
Harrison, who is the author of the acclaimed horror novel The Listeners in addition to being a fabulous editor, gave his popular talk “Bad Math; or, How Right and Left Brains Work Together: The Function of Logic in Fiction.” See, most fiction writers are right-brained people, filled with creative ideas they’re outright compelled to bring to the written page. The inventiveness of the creative mind is a remarkable and romantic thing, but a novel is a big and complex entity, and it doesn’t work on creativity alone. For many would-be authors, even genuinely brilliant ones, managing and understanding story logic is a difficult task to achieve and the greatest obstacle to overcome. This talk addressed various types of logic issues, including some writers rarely hear about, like rationalization and context. With Harrison, the participants explored exactly why logic is so important in a field founded in the magic of creative invention.
Harrison provokes thought at every level of the writing process, from the very basics that are all too easy to overlook to the intricacies of wordsmithing.–Chris O’Brien
Many thanks to conference organizer of AwesomeCon for the invitation, and to all the volunteers who made the event such a great experience.
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