The Writers Conference

Their locations appeal; Nashville, Las Vegas, Key West, their premise a promise: opportunity to speak directly with agents, publishers, and fellow writers. Workshops on Strategic Blogging, Developmental Editing, and Unforgettable Characters Readers Just Can’t Quit. Panels on Building Action-Driven Stories and Writing the Novella.

I wondered why the musical “British Invasion” of the 1960s was pivotal in American culture, until I watched uniformed school children walk in orderly fashion out of a local elementary school. All dressed the same, all obeying the same instruction, all taught the same lessons. All subjected to discipline that valued conformity over creativity, conventionality over individuality, essentially oppression over expression.

“It gets back to the fact that writing is utterly personal, utterly private,” John Steinbeck wrote. “The ideal life for a writer is for his work to be celebrated and for himself to be unknown. Writers thrive on privacy, many even on loneliness and despair. It’s the writer’s condition. Today, with television, you see writers who go out and get interviewed before millions of people just to sell their books. Some of them are even becoming celebrities. I find the whole business ridiculous.”

“Writers should work alone,” Ernest Hemingway agreed. “They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise, they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics. But once they are in the bottle they stay there.”

There are costs involved, besides considerable conference fees. There will be flights, hotels, and meals. One should anticipate book and souvenir purchases, as well as the occasional, or sometimes frequent, adult beverage.

“I dislike literary discussions about anything,” Sinclair Lewis wrote. “I dislike the habit of some literary men who want to talk book stuff. The really literary species do not talk about books; they are too busy writing them.”

Hints of an approaching mid-century literary revolution came when Robert Frost complained that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down, or when Truman Capote commented on Jack Kerouac’s style, “that’s not writing, that’s typing.” Hint came in the 1953 movie The Wild One, when Marlon Brando, in response to, “What are you rebelling against?” famously replied, “Whaddaya got?”

In an interview, Howard Stern said, “There’s something they say about driving a car, I was just learning this over the weekend that it turns off the left side of your brain, so driving seems to be just something that frees you creatively, yeah?” To which Willie Nelson replied, “If I really need and want to write a song today, I’ll get in the car and take off driving down the highway in any direction, and I’ll write a song.”

Despite TV’s obvious new marketing strength, Steinbeck resisted. “Does it make them better writers? Worse writers? No, it has nothing to do with being writers. Except that by exposing their real selves to public scrutiny before that unforgiving camera eye, they run the risk of no longer being taken seriously. Take someone like Norman Mailer. The guy had a promising career as an important writer. Now he’s no longer a writer, but a performer with a pen. Sure, television has revolutionized our life here. But there’s no way television can be compatible with what writing is all about…writers are by their very nature private people, in many cases lonely, frightened, insecure, incapable of relating comfortably to other people. The entire act of writing is private and solitary…I am a private person. Almost every good writer I know is.”

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Though those quoted here are iconic, their words are dated, today’s literary landscape vastly altered from The Grapes of Wrath and For Whom the Bell Tolls era, the time when Arrowsmith was read, and not merely listened to. But Thomas Jefferson, himself known for a bit of writing, understood: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

I make flight and hotel reservations, reserve a car. I pack credit cards and a change of clothing and am off to my writers conference. I will drive approximately 900 miles over the next four days through an appealing location. I will think about plotting, characterization, and irony regarding work literally at hand. I will mutter to myself. I will ponder the literary world’s metamorphosis into audio books, e-commerce, and platforms. I will argue with myself and often win. I will lower my window, strain to hear advice in the wind and hopefully return refreshed, my words disorderly and stripped of uniforms, new songs hummed by foreign invaders. Call me crazy, but I’m on the road again.

“I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived,” Steinbeck said of his greatest achievement, “not the way books are written.” To those who may question my choice of conference and ask, what are you rebelling against? I would reply:

“Whaddaya got?”