Day After Intensives-For Mary

As a participant in the day after intensives, I must say that the energy was gone. Where did it go and who lost it? The participants? The teachers?

I was highly anticipating my time with Arthur Levine-a powerhouse in the world of publishing. And he certainly was a delight. The class was not. Three hours long and formatted...hmmm...
I'll describe the format, you, the reader must decide.
First of all, there were too many people. Too many people. Three hour class and Levine chose to go over the beginning chapter of each of our novels. Of course there was not enough time and each author listened to 3 minutes of feedback with 100 minutes of listening to feedback from someone else's novel after only hearing the first page read by each author.
I tried to listen and glean from the experience and the master in editing. But really, how helpful was it?
What ARthur did teach us was some fantastic insight on that first chapter. He compared it to a first date. Did the analogy work? Somewhat. We must compare our first chapter to the impression we want to present on a first date. What do we want to happen on a first date? We want to engage the guy, get him interested and hope, (if he's a catch) that he will come back for more, or in book terms, turn the page and read the next chapter.
So what kind of impression are we making on our first date?
He also took examples from several celebrated books. It only took the first few paragraphs to see the strength of these novels, to recognize that they had all presented themselves very well, in very different ways.
The examples were: Harry Potter, book 1, Millicent Min Girl Genius, The Golden Compass, Marcelo in the Real World, The Bad Beginning: A series of Unfortunate Events, James and the Giant Peach, When She Was Good, Deep Down Popular, In the Shadow of the Ark, The Year of the Secret Assignments.

There was a strange, really strange aspect of the class. After our tutorial, Arthur called on each student to read the first page of their novel, after which he made very good comments-negative and positive, and suggestions for improvement. The first woman he called on didn't have her manuscript with her. She had a meltdown and it started the class in a humiliating fashion-it was like we were all back in first grade and Suzie forgot her homework and was falling apart. Arthur was shocked and showed it, that a participant didn't bring her own manuscript--there were three or four others who didn't have theirs either-(remember I said the class had too many participants--24?) They too were overly embarrassed, too much for the adults that we were.
Right away this established Arthur as the almight-which authors tend to look at editors that way too much already. Go figure.

Would I stay for after-conference intensives again? No...