On Wednesday night I was seated with all my critique group friends getting ready to start for the evening. We were going over some pre-meeting pleasantries, and the group leader speaks up and says, “And don’t forget! This Saturday is the annual Gathering of Writers here at the Arts Center. We have 76 people signed up for so far, which is more than we’d hoped for. Robert Owen Butler will be the keynote speaker, and we’ve got some great workshops as well. It’s fifty dollars, and it should be a lot of fun.”
Oh, crap. This was it. I knew it. The next New Thing I Should Try.
“Um, what time does that start?” I asked.
“It starts at 8:30am and goes until, I think, five.”
Just great – it doesn’t even interfere with anything I already have planned! How am I supposed to try and avoid it if it doesn’t conflict with anything!
“Hmmm…maybe I should try and do that,” I said.
The following morning I sat and stared at the sing-up screen on my computer. Fifty bucks. That expenditure was easy to justify, and it was only a single day. Would I learn enough? Would a day even help? In order for me to improve as a writer, wouldn’t I need, like, a week? Wouldn’t I need to sequester myself into some commune in the woods with no internet or phone access and discover my true self with a bunch of other neurotic author wannabes? Sure I’d put a note on my fridge early this summer about wanting to go to the Iowa Writer’s Conference, and sure I couldn’t afford the time or money, but was this what I should be doing instead.
A little voice somewhere inside me, which is probably me, but seems far smarter than Usual Me, spoke up at that point. “Fifty bucks, one day, and it’s a three minute drive from your house. You’ve been wanting to go to a writer’s conference for a year. The only way this could get ANY easier is if they offered to hold it in your house for free.”
I signed up.
Saturday morning brough with it one of those blessedly gorgeous fall days that define the beauty that is the Midwest. As I was parking my car, a woman, looking for the correct place to park, asked if I was attending the writing conference. “Yes. Yes, I am,” I replied, and then I thought, ‘Holy crap! I am! I’m doing this!’
Inside I got signed up, picked up all my materials, and noted the placement of the all-important coffee service. I didn’t get to it for several minutes, however, because I became involved in a conversation with several other attendees, only one of which I’d ever met previously. In the middle of it all I went, “Weird. I’m having a very enjoyable conversation with other writers! Writers I don’t even know! And we’re all hung up about how we’re doing as writers and what we hope to learn! And I’m enjoying this!” There were lots of exclamation points in my head. These were important thoughts.
The keynote speaker, Robert Owen Butler, gave us an hour about how we should forget everything we know, and write from the heart. We needed to write two hours a day if we wanted to really get with it, really be serious about making good writing happen. I was curious, a bit fearful, skeptical, and doubtful. I don’t write two hours a day. I don’t know where I’d find the time. If I did (and I’m sure I could if I really, really put my mind to it), this would pretty much mean I didn’t do anything else, at least not during a work week. Was I not serious? Did I not really want it? Was I not a real writer?
I decided to leave all that unanswered for the time being. I was not going to stop writing, but I wasn’t going to start killing myself trying to do exactly everything he said. It worries me though, this two-hour daily dedication. I know that applying yourself to a creative pursuit takes a self-induced repetitive regimen, and Butler was not the first one to drive that point home. Stephen King’s book On Writing also notes that he spends a ton of time at the keyboard. “If you want to write, you have to write. A lot.” That’s not a direct quote, but it’s pretty much the gist of what both gentlemen were saying. I sat there still feeling the joy of my recently completed rolling ball sculpture, and wondered what the hell I was doing correctly, if anything. I’ll just keep up with all of this stuff and see where it leads. After all, writing a little bit is a lot more writing than none at all.
Following the keynote speech I attended a class on grant writing and then one on plotting for murder mysteries and thrillers. I can now write a grant proposal that will keep you hanging onto the edge of your seat wondering who killed the starving artist.
After lunch my first afternoon class covered Finding Your Voice. While it did outline some helpful strategies for getting started if you were totally blocked as a writer, overall I didn’t feel it helped me out too much. I was also slightly disturbed by the leader’s admission that she had “a lot of unfinished stuff. I start a lot of things, but don’t finish much, so that’s my new effort now.” I was hoping to find my voice, not my unfinished manuscripts.
So far the day had been largely positive. It was fun to hustle from room to room between workshops, nodding hello to other writers, and gathering with a group of strangers who all shared the same purpose. The classes were even in different buildings, so hurrying from one to the other felt like being in college again. My mind felt younger, and I recalled that rush I had when I first went off to school and it seemed like everything was possible, which is important for me to remember. Having the feeling of possibility is what makes stuff happen. If it cost me fifty bucks and all I got was that, I’d still be money ahead.
I was looking forward to the final workshop, Fictionalize Your Own Experience. I was thinking of my experiences in the world of hot rodding, of being in a band, of racing my motorcycle at Bonneville. These experiences are a little unique, and I’ve always hoped I could bring something different to my writing by somehow incorporating some of those elements, or at least the feelings I’d experienced through them. I’d hoped I could learn how to do some of that in this class.
We met in the printmaking room of the arts building, pulling our mismatched chairs around a table scarred from the multitudes of cutting blades that had been pulled across it. This class was going to contain some writing exercises, we were informed. After a short rustling, we sat, pens and paper poised, awaiting our cue. The leader paused, smiled, and spoke. “Write about a woman stealing at Walmart. The woman is your grandmother.”
Um…oh crap. This is not what I was expecting. This is not my experience! I don’t have any shoplifting history (okay, that one time at Kroger when I got nabbed after suddenly deciding that lifting a candy bar would be “fun,” but that’s it!). And while my grandmother was tight as hell and wouldn’t pay 89 cents for a bag of jellybeans, because “That’s too much!” she sure as hell wouldn’t steal it. What do I do with this?!?
“Try to fictionalize your grandmother as this woman who is stealing,” the leader explained, suddenly seeming like much more of a writer than my humble self.
Ah, I see. Well, that’s tough, but I came to be challeged, didn’t I? I can do this! I scribbled and scratched. I came up with a fictitious person who had some characteristics of my grandmother, but was quite different in a few ways. It took me a few minutes, to mentally get there, and we only had ten total.
“Okay, let’s see what we have,” I heard. Damn. Only four sentences.
Readings were called for. A couple of women offered theirs and read. On the third query, I raised my own. I was not going to let this thing beat me. The only way to get this was to confront it head on. I read my four lines aloud. They sounded very short.
“What did the woman look like, Tom?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know. Just…glasses…gray hair. I, ah, I guess I’m not too good with description,” I finished, managing a bit of a smile.
“Okay. That’s fine. Does anyone have some description in their events?”
Hands went up. People read. Descriptions followed. Oh well, maybe not my strong suit.
“Now do a description of this same woman getting caught, and add a character trait to her that your grandmother didn’t have.”
Aww…Argh! More of this?! How-what-argh!
I sat there for ten minutes, trying to come up with something. How do I describe this woman? What are words for kinds of coats beyond color? What does her face look like? What are her hands like? Do I have any vocabulary AT ALL?!?!?!?!?!?!
I managed four sentences again. One of them was just standard dialog. Collectively, they kind of sucked.
“Tom, would you like to read yours?”
I declined. “My description isn’t very good.”
Other people read. Description seemed to be bountiful. It filled the room except for the apparent descriptical vaccum chamber that surrounded my head.
“This time, write a scene in which a person is steppping onto an elevator. As the person steps on, he or she notices another couple engaged in some sort of playful physical affection, and notices that one of them is a person he or she had an affair with some time in the past. Make the person stepping onto the elevator out of a friend of yours.”
I sat and stared at my paper. I could hear scribbling all around me. No scribbling noises emanated from the vicinity of my fingertips. I didn’t have friends who would get involved in something like that, did I? How do you write that? What are they wearing? How would someone feel? What would they feel? Why would they even care – it’s ancient history? How do I write this!
I wouldn’t be beaten. I could do this somehow. I could. I stared. My mind whirled around and around. I was very conscious of the prosaic excellence that was most assuredly going on around me. One of the women in the room was in my critique group. She was writing up a storm. Surely it was something good. I put pen to paper and, “The doors to the elevator opened, and Janet was met with the sight of a couple nuzzling and giggling inside. She let her long, dark hair fall across her face before the two could look at her, and quickly stepped inside and turned to face the front.”
“Let’s see what we have.”
Two. Two sentences. Great.
A number of people read. They were masterworks of literary triumph! I stared at my two sentences. As each reader finished, the leader looked around the group for another. I avoided her eyesight. No way. No way was I going to be called on.
“Tom? Would you like to read yours?” Something inside me got very tight.
“I – I only got two sentences,” I smiled weakly.
“Can you read them?”
“There’s nothing there. Like, the elevator doors open and she gets on. That’s all I got.” I was allowed to pass, but discouragement stayed.
“For the final exercise, take a person you know and give them a different trait from another person you know. Try to make this trait as different as possible from the main person. Create a situation where they are confronting someone of authority.”
Machinery ground together, but nothing moved. I was totally locked up. As writing went on around me, I steamed, fretted, and didn’t write. How do you put two people together like that? How can you make someone act a way they would never act? What – ?
I scribbled desperately. “‘So what do we have to do to fix this?’ Bob asked.”
“Okay, who wants to read?”
One. One sentence.
Mercifully, I wasn’t called on. We listened to others read their examples, and each one seemed to hammer home the fact that I had no clue whatsoever what I was doing. Why was I at this conference? Did I think I was a writer? Why did I think that? It was plainly obvious I was lacking in basic skills. Why did I even show up?
After receiving some overall instruction, the lead acknowledged that it was a tough set of exercises, and that she usually performed the same set during a four hour long class as opposed to our fifty minutes. I ignored that largely. I gathered my things and headed off to the panel discussion on publishing. Why, I didn’t know, because I certainly was in no shape to have anything of mine published. I couldn’t even describe what an old woman who’s shoplifting looks like. However, as with Masterpiece in a Day, I was determined to stick it out. I was not going to leave until I’d attended all the events. That was my goal, and I was sticking to it, sucky writing or not.
I sat down in the conference hall, and another writer took his seat next to me. He’d either recently gotten some good news, or was just in a pleasant mood that day, as he was a bit talkative. I, having just been pulverized in a fifty-minute workshop, was not.
“So, do you want to exchange manuscripts?” he asked.
“Not today,” I answered, eyes staying trained on the largely empty stage in front of us where nothing was happening.
“I’ve only got twenty-five copies in my car!” he smiled. I said nothing. A minute or two later he moved one seat away from me.
As the panel went on, I cooled somewhat, or maybe I warmed up a little again. I listened to Tom Chiarella talk about getting published with Esquire. I listened to an agent discuss how to present story ideas, and in the process hand off a compliment on an idea from that same girl who’d been scribbling up a storm in my previous, humiliating workshop. I couldn’t be too mad. It was an excellent idea.
As the panel ended, I split. I still wasn’t feeling chatty. Besides, I had my NaNoWriMo group was meeting in half an hour. I didn’t want to be late for talking about November’s novel challenge, especially since coffee would be involved. I might have smiled a bit at the realization that, while I’d felt humiliated a mere hour beforehand, I was now eagerly darting off to a meeting of writers.
At the meeting, conversation turned to my conference attendance.
“How’d that go?” one of my NaNo compatriots asked.
I smiled, “It went pretty well, really. I had a great time. Totally melted on this one exercise though! It was this descriptive exercise, and my brain locked up completely. Apparently, I’m terrible with description in a story setting, which means I should never be a writer,” I paused and smiled, “which I am now describing…while sitting in a meeting with a group of writers. Yeah, it’s obviously turned me off of writing for life!”