Working at writing: It's all about how you spend your time

I’ve been to only a small number of writers’ conferences. Still, this article by writer/editor A. Victoria Mixon about when to be skeptical made me smile, because it reminded me not only of conferences but also of all the adult ed classes on writing that I used to take when I was in my twenties, and, to some extent, what I now sometimes say when people ask me about writers’ groups.

The pitfall that all of these things – conferences, classes, writers’ groups – have in common is that before you spend your time and/or money on them, you have to ask yourself this: Will I get more out of this experience than I’ll gain if I spend the same amount of time at my desk (or favorite armchair or Starbucks table or treehouse) writing?

Because really, that’s what I’ve learned in the twenty years since college, approximately half of which I spent trying to become a published writer and the other half, the ten years since, I’ve spent actually getting work published. Time you spend writing is almost always more valuable than time you spend listening to other people talk about writing, because if my experience is any indicator, writing is really more than anything about practice.

Moreover, there are people whose advice you should listen to when it comes to writing if you want to get published, but they are not friends or instructors; they are editors, and not just any editors but the editor of the publication you are writing for, or trying to write for, or hoping to write for. I’m a regular contributor to the Boston Globe. In my early adulthood, I took a variety of adult ed classes that, since they were offered in Boston and were on the topic of freelance journalism, might as well have been called “How to Write for the Boston Globe.”

Nothing I learned in those five years has been as useful to me as three or four cumulative conversations with one of the many editors at the Globe who has edited one of my stories. They know what they want, and over the years, I’ve learned how to write what they want. That’s not to say it’s the only way to do it, but this is a situation where practical application is so much more valuable than a theoretical approach. I learned how to write for the Globe by, well, writing for the Globe. And I got my foot in the door not by polishing my skills in writing classes but by sitting at my desk coming up with story ideas and eventually finding some that the Globe wanted.

With conferences, the issue is a little different, but my impression has often been that writers who attend conferences squander a lot of time talking about writing when they could be practicing it. The exception for me was the one time I took an admissions-based workshop at a conference. It wasn’t that we were necessarily more talented writers than any twelve members of an open-enrollment conference session; it was just that each of us had to submit a writing sample from a project we had under way in order to be accepted, and the fact that we were working on a specific project meant that the conversation was more targeted than the typical free-for-all discussions at conferences in which participants asking speakers unhelpful questions like “Where do you get your ideas?” (Really, if you have to ask that, you probably shouldn’t even be attending a writers’ conference.)

Writers’ groups are another issue. I belong to one very large group of freelancers, but it’s a networking group, not a critique group. We meet a few times a year for socializing and sometimes to hear a speaker talk about a very specifically targeted topic like writing for the web or writing a screenplay. It’s useful because the information is so specific. I haven’t joined a critique group in many, many years because as valuable as the insights of other writers can be, it’s again a matter of weighing the time you commit to the group against the time you could be writing. In writers’ groups, not only do you spend time at the meetings; you commit to reading other people’s work in between meetings, and the more group members you have, the more time that involves.

Yes, it’s true that over the years I’ve learned from conference presenters, writing colleagues, panelists, authors, and all kinds of other external sources, but ultimately, nothing has taught me as much about writing as sitting at my desk writing has. And nothing has taught me as much about how to get published as talking to an editor who is potentially willing to publish my work.

Writing conferences can be a great diversion, when a diversion is what you need. But for the most part, in my experience, succeeding at writing is about outlining ideas, writing copy, revising drafts. No money, no registration, no applications, no travel. Just sit down and write, and you’re taking the best steps possible for your career as a writer.