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.

Privileged to tell their stories

Weekly if not monthly I think about how lucky I am to be a journalist, but usually my reason for thinking that is just that I like the work so much and it’s what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. This month it’s been a little different: I feel lucky all over again, but not only because the work makes me happy but because it’s been a genuine privilege to cover the stories I’ve covered this month.

Just yesterday, I put the final wraps on a “centerpiece” feature that will run the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. It’s about a nearby town that is unveiling a memorial to the four fallen soldiers who graduated from the local high school, and I’ve learned so much while working on the story, both about military logistics and about how families cope in the wake of tragedy.

I thought the calls I had to make would be hard: to the families of two young men who died in Iraq, six and seven years ago, respectively. But their family members talked about them with a sense of fond good cheer. One young man’s mother laughed and laughed as she told me about her son as a ten-year-old building a fox hole in the backyard. How can she be so merry? I wondered as I listened to her. Indeed, some of it might have been a touch of mild hysteria brought on by my taking an interest in her stories about him, and maybe preparing for the dedication next week has made her more emotionally mercurial right at this time than she normally is. But she didn’t sound like I expected. She just wanted to tell me funny stories about her son, and then in a tone only a shade more somber, she talked about her gratitude to the town for initiating the memorial.

After that I talked to the younger sister of the other Iraq soldier. He died at nineteen, as she was about to celebrate her thirteenth birthday. “He was the most awesome brother,” she told me, her tone exuberant. “He’d babysit for my little sister and me and do the silliest dances to make us laugh.”

I expected the families to sound more angry, more depressed. But they were proud of their soldiers, they were full of happy memories, they were grateful to the town for planning the Memorial Day dedication. “The community has been a tremendous source of support to us, and we’re so grateful,” said the father of one of the young men.

Last week I was working on a very different story, one about Transcendentalist and writer Margaret Fuller. A group in Concord was in the final stages of planning a bicentennial celebration honoring her 200th birthday, and they were just as eager and willing to tell me about their passion for Margaret Fuller’s lifework as the soldiers’ family members were to tell me about their lost loved ones. In the few days I spent researching that story, I learned a lot about Margaret Fuller, a historical figure I first heard about in a very general sense in eighth grade and then for several years thereafter confused with Margaret Sanger. I definitely won’t make that mistake again. I felt privileged to spend those days in her company just as I did with the soldiers.

And the weekend before that I did a story that was not like either the fallen soldiers or Margaret Fuller. I wrote about my parents’ volunteer work at prisons. For years, I’ve wanted to write about the program through which my parents volunteer, but it’s the irony of my work as a feature writer that I can write about anyone who I think is doing something fascinating except for my own family members. In a feature story, that is. But every now and then the Globe runs a personal essay segment. That’s a first-person narrative and the usual rules do not apply. I asked my editor if I could try an essay about my parents’ volunteer work and what it means to me, and she said yes.

The results were spectacular, not in terms of my prose but in terms of the response. Strangers were calling my home phone number to say how much they enjoyed reading about my parents. Friends and acquaintances from all over the Globe’s readership mentioned the story to me, and to my parents as well. My mother heard from two former volunteers who had lost touch with the program, and she also heard from a town employee whose brother was once an inmate – though not one my parents worked with – and the town employee felt reassured to learn that there were people like my parents devoting their time to people like him.

So it’s been a good month for me: not because I’ve had a lot of bylines or paychecks but because I’ve experienced so much through my journalism. I’ve learned about the resilience of brave and proud, though bereaved, parents; the determination of a nineteenth century feminist; and the power of my own parents to affect people through their work. And I did all this through my work. I’m not a soldier, a crusader, not even a volunteer to the needy. I can’t claim to be doing anything nearly as important as my subjects. So what I’ve done in telling their stories is not something for me to be proud of, just grateful for. I’m always grateful to be a journalist. This month I’ve felt enormously privileged as well.