amo vitam

Finally, after three years of absence (one due to holidays, two to You-Know-What), this past weekend Steve and I got to go to a real-life, in-person Writers Conference again. People! Writers! Books! Workshops and conversations about plot and character and publishing and writing software and essays and food writing and the difficulties of switching genre and getting things done and how weird it is to be, well, as weird as we are… It was glorious.

What did I learn, you wonder? Well, aside from all the stuff I really can’t summarize in a little blog post—you had to have been there, that’s what we take those workshops for—there are two thoughts I came away with. Neither one of which should have been news, but they kind of were.

Thought #1: Writers don’t look like their publicity photos. Well, okay, some do; they’re just naturally handsome and photogenic and we all hate them for it. But several times that weekend, when a writer was introduced and walked up on stage, I had a little “Oh!” moment. As in, “Oh, they actually look like a normal person! They’re older/larger/less perfectly groomed/more grey-haired/whatever than I thought!” With some of them the “Oh!” moment happened when they started reading from their work: in their writing, they’re so eloquent, so polished, so poised—but on stage, there might have been a slight stammer or a lisp, or they read their work with less expression than it deserved, or their hands were shaking just a bit.

Writers, I realized, are just normal people. Even those “big names” with multiple published works and bestsellers to their credit, whom I look up to with a tinge of envy. Reading the eloquence of their writing, and looking at their attractive and polished photos, I got intimidated; then I saw them in the flesh, and they turned out to be—well, real. Actual human beings. I haven’t lost one iota of my admiration for them, I’m just not intimidated by them personally anymore (well, not as much). I can be inspired instead.

Thought #2: There is more than one way of doing things. “Thou shalt outline!”—“I can’t outline my novels, I have to write several discovery drafts and throw out the first three until I figure out what happens.”—“Write a synopsis first and work from that!”—“I don’t know what the book is about until I’ve written it.” All of those statements came from successful authors with several published books to their credit. Directly contradicting what the last successful author with several published books to their credit had said.

That there is more than one way of doing things is a revelation that I had about more than one creative field in the last couple of years. I wrote about it with regards to knitting (and life) two years ago, and just a few months back, I realized it about pottery: I was taught one particular way to throw on the wheel, and I was getting frustrated because I wasn’t doing very well with it. I concluded that it’s because I didn’t know the right way to do it. I started watching online videos, and several of the instructors were quite dogmatic about how it’s supposed to be done: Never, never use a sponge to pull up—no, always use a sponge to pull up! Wedge every piece you throw and make sure you put it on the wheel the right way around—no, just smack it into a ball, it doesn’t matter which way it lands on the wheel! This is the only right way to do it—no, this is the only right way to do it! The more online videos I watched and books I read, the more different ways of doing it I saw. And all of these people produce beautiful work.

It seems that that also holds true for writing (which, in case you missed the point, is my revelation du jour). Plotting, pantsing, structured, unstructured, according to a map, discovering as you go—what it comes down to is that you need to do what works. What matters is that you get the thing written. It’s irrelevant if you’ve outlined or inlined (I just made that up), as long as you get a piece of writing out of it. There is not just one way of doing things, and the really exciting thing about that is that because there are so many ways of doing things, you always have another option—if this doesn’t work for you, try that instead.

That’s what’s so wonderful about events like Writers Festivals: so many opportunities to learn different ways of doing things! And as exciting as it was to get back to an in-person conference, the Pandemic [ugh!] has actually had a good effect here. If you can’t make it to a real-life festival (either because you can’t afford it, or you live too far away, or, which is a perfectly legitimate reason, you’re not comfortable being physically close to so many germ-breathing strangers yet), the number of online options have proliferated in the last couple of years. You can attend festivals and learn from those amazing pros from the comfort of your own personal computer chair, finding out all about novel structure or how to plot a mystery, or, for that matter, how to sculpt a ceramic camel using newspaper as armature.

And I can tell you that the learning experience in an online conference can be just as intense; you need just as much time to recover from it as from a real-life convention (i.e., you spend the day afterwards collapsed on the couch, trying to let your poor brain recover from all the input). Speaking of which, I think Steve still hasn’t got over this one; he’s gone missing. I know he came home with me—here he is in the kitchen perched on the stack of books we brought home—but I haven’t been able to find him anywhere since. Well, I’m sure he’ll resurface once he’s had a long nap and revitalized his woolly brain.

Life, the Universe, and a Writers Conference. Writers are normal people, and there is more than one way of doing things.