🧑⚖️ It's a Little Bit Me, It's a Little Bit You...
This last weekend was the 47th Archon, the local speculative fiction convention here in St. Louis. I started attending as a panelist right after things opened up post-COVID. Needless to say, overall attendance was down and they were in pretty dire need of speakers, so I fast-tracked my way onto the "Pro" tier. I've gone every year since, and I've developed a bit of a reputation as a fantastic moderator.
To wit, five minutes into my first Saturday panel. I'd just wrapped up my opening spiel and was about to start the discussion-proper when the panelist on my right turned to me with what I initially thought was exasperation. "Oh my god," she said, "can I bring you to all of my panels to moderate?"
This panelist just happened to be the Toastmistress of the con. As Toastmistress, her schedule was stacked, so I can see her being extra appreciative. A badly-managed panel is exhausting to all of the participants, and when you're on ten of those, you can run out of spoons quickly. Hence, the dramatic delivery. That said, she seemed to carry some of it forward--she later admitted to copying bits of my spiel at one of the panels she was moderating on Sunday.
What I'm saying is, I'm good at this.
And it's no wonder, because I've got a sh'ton of practice. I've been leading/co-leading a local writing discussion group for over a decade now, which is very similar to running a panel. The biggest difference is that there are twenty-odd panelists instead of four, but the panelists are also the audience. Everything else is pretty similar--it's me trying to politely wrangle a bunch of opinionated adults with varying degrees of expertise and a propensity to veer wildly off topic. The skills I've developed there are highly transferable! So I thought it would be worth talking through my process and philosophy a bit, since people do find it useful. And the secret is...
Profound contempt for the audience.
Okay, that's not true. Well, not entirely true. More precisely, my goal with any panel I'm moderating is to:
- Keep the peace.
- Let the experts talk.
This just happens to look like contempt for the audience. Let me explain.
Archon is not a writing convention; it's a fandom convention with a writing track. Fans are--almost by definition--people who bring a lot of opinions with them. Now, in the fandom panels, that's fine. There's an expectation, at Archon anyway, that audience members are going to be sharing their opinions a lot. They have a tendency to opine and just shout things from the back of the room. This, incidentally, is why I won't do fandom panels anymore; trying to wrangle all of that just stresses me out. But the truth of the matter is that, with some exceptions, the panelists' opinions aren't any more or less valid than the fans'. There's not really any such thing as a "professional fan" (podcasters notwithstanding, I guess), and it's not like there are good techniques to do fandom that you can learn from an expert.
Craft panels are a different story. A writing panel will have both independent and traditionally published authors, and often other related professionals. Last weekend I attended panels with freelance editors, filmmakers, literary agents, and more. These people unequivocally have more expertise than the typical audience member, and their opinions are far more valid about matters of craft. But the audience doesn't know that. They come into the panel prepared to interrupt and share their opinions.
And. I'm. Not. Having. It!
The level of discourse always dips when audience members start injecting their opinions. There may be someone out there with genuine insights that they could share, but that would be the exception rather than the rule. (And, hint hint: experts will almost always have an insightful question rather than an insightful opinion.) The typical vocal panel attendee is someone who has done a little thinking and no legwork about this particular aspect of craft, but they aren't going to let that stop them. To let the audience take over the panel is to watch
the Dunning-Kruger Effect blossom into its final evolution.
So let me save you some time. Your opinion isn't as interesting as you think it is. Nobody cares about your work-in-progress. Nobody cares what you think about Spanish Imperialism and how time travel might have affected the Americas. (Seriously!) You are not a panelist. You are an audient!
So I open every panel I moderate the same way. I thank the audience for coming. I ask the panelists to introduce themselves. And then I say this: "I'm going to ask the panelists some questions, and then I'm going to leave about twenty minutes at the and for audience questions, so if you could please hold your questions until then, that would be great. And I'm going to insist that your question should take the form of a question. I am going to be a jerk about this."
I repeat that last bit right before opening up for questions. Polite, if vaguely threatening. Because my other goal is to keep the peace, and it's a lot easier to preempt bad behavior than to have to shut someone down while they're talking. Frequently this is just a matter of treating the panelists fairly and trying to mitigate any potential conflicts. Panels usually have a diversity of opinions, and in the cases of writing spec fic, this can mean old white guys versus social justice warriors. Things can occasionally get tense. So I always reach out to my panelists ahead of time to find out if there are any topics that they definitely want to cover or definitely want to avoid.
Far more often, problems stem from the audience. On one of my panels, someone asked if "woke" was a genre of writing or just a passing fad or what. And yes, he used finger quotes. And it's worth noting that I was wearing a shirt that said "non-toxic" on it, so it ain't like I was keeping my politics close to the chest (er... metaphorically, anyway). And so I spent a few minutes gingerly defusing that, trying to put "woke" into a perspective that he could accept. I've been told that perhaps I was a bit too gentle, but I stand by it. Misguided as I believe this guy to be--and, reader, my opinion of him did not go up at all as he elaborated--I wanted to treat him with dignity and give him a serious answer. What good would just shutting him down and dismissing him out-of-hand have accomplished? What would he say if he ran into me at another panel? Which, it's also worth noting, he did.
And no, that did not raise my opinion of him either. But we were civil and I hope he took something useful away from the exchange.
Civility, it should also also be noted, is not always an option. I did, in fact, have to use Dad Voice™ at a different panel to silence some chuckleheads who were being deliberately argumentative and who--it turned out--didn't have badges to begin with and were just crashing the con.
All of this to say that I err on the side of over-managing the audience, so we can let the experts talk. And I want the experts to sound as knowledgeable as possible. This should not be a surprise to anyone, but there's often a bit of pre-gaming that goes on. I like to have about ten questions prepared that I will send to the panelist a day or two ahead, with the idea that I'll start at the top and work my way down, but probably won't get to more than half because I'm also going to be taking notes so I can work in questions that have arisen organically from the discussion. I love asking a panelist to dig a little deeper into a topic that they brought up glancingly. Because, again, we're here to let the experts talk.
This also includes silencing myself, when appropriate. If there are four other panelists, or if the panelists have more relevant experience or expertise than me... I don't weigh in very much. This can be a challenge because honey I gots opinions, but that's not what I'm there to do. I actually prefer moderating panels where I have some knowledge but not all that much. Enough to formulate intelligent questions, but not so much that I don't learn anything.
Now, obviously, exceptions abound. One of my panels (the planned moderator didn't show, so I kinda-sorta stepped in) was about overstimulation at cons, and every single person in the room had sensory processing issues. In that case, I was more than happy to let the audience speak. It was much more of a conversation, because in this case, they were experts about their own coping mechanisms. And there was one person in the audience who seemed to be far more knowledgeable than either myself or the other panelist. In situations like that, it's much more about guiding the discussion and trying to head off rabbit-holes. Which, to be honest, is pretty much what I do every month with my writing group.
So anyway, I thought I'd share this and hope it's insightful to anyone looking to moderate convention panels in the future. Use the tools at your disposal to make the smart people sound even smarter and let the audience engage without getting in the experts' way.
That's what I think anyway,
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