Stealing Time for a Writing Conference

We so often put writing last on our priority list. We feel guilty for “stealing” writing time from our day job, our family, and our friends. Taking the time and the money to go to a writing conference seems selfish. After all, we can learn writing techniques and marketing tips from books and blogs, so why spend the money? Isn’t the time you’d spend at the conference better spent on writing?

Sure, you can spend that time on you writing; slogging away at the keyword, pulling the prose out of your soul while you worry about all the other things on your to-do list that are waiting for you as soon as you leave your computer. But what if you instead spent it learning from people that have read all the books and the blogs and condensed it down to what you really need to know? What if you spent it hanging out with people who are just as passionate about writing as you are? People who understand that a personalized rejection letter is a successful step on the way to publication because that means someone in the publishing industry read your writing?

Interesting things happen when you put a bunch of writers in the same space at the same time. Finally the pursuers of this solitary craft find a group that really understands them, understands their frustration with dealing with editors, understands that characters in their prose sometimes speak to them directly, and understands why the placement of a comma can completely change the meaning of a sentence, an expression, or a whole conversation.

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I am so jazzed up after all the cool stuff I learned yesterday—tips and tricks of the freelance writing world, how to edit yourself, how to fine tune your pitch, how to keep track of your taxes, how to write a killer mystery, and more. Talking and thinking about writing all day yesterday made me stay up last night working on my latest WIP. Being around creative energy fueled my own creativity.

I say take the time and the money, even if you have to “steal” it from something else. Sometimes we need to hang out with “our own kind” to remember why we write in the first place and to fuel the creative places in ourselves. The energy I’ve gained from attending this conference fueled three chapters and an outline for the next five. It would have taken me much longer to write those at home, alone in my office, staring at a blank page while waiting for inspiration to strike.