“Pick up a postcard on your table and write your address on it. Take what you’ve learned in this conference and write to your future self. Which words of encouragement would you impart?”
Among the postcards of city scenes and outdoor landscapes, the beach scene is the closest to me. I felt a lump in my throat.
“Dear Anne, You are free to write. Don’t wait. Don’t listen to your doubtful self. Just do it. You have so much material now. You have learned the tactics and tools. You have no more excuses. Pour your heart out. Write that unrequited love story about the lonely and ageing surfer and the young grieving widow-bride. Embrace your destiny.”
I look around me. There is something weird and wonderful about finding my tribe at last. Up to eight hundred people, mostly women, had gathered at this writing conference to listen to keynote speakers tell us that we are all the same. We struggle at writing what we care about, something that does not bring instant gratification or guarantee of monetary rewards. We wonder why we are not like everyone else. Why can’t we stick to jobs that bring us security, advancement, and recognition? Why do we wreck the well-laid plans of mice and men, the law partnership after years of law school, the medical practice, the consulting career after MBA?
It’s my first writing conference. My friend Lisa had invited me to one in New York City last August, alerting me to the existence of such events. Why trek to Manhattan in the heat of summer when the “Muse and Marketplace” takes place right here in Boston? I thought about working for Grubstreet to avoid the $500 conference fee. After much hesitation, I joined Grubstreet to get on their mailing list and pay the reduced conference fee.
Unlike the energy conferences that I had blitzed as magazine editor, famously earning the reputation for collecting business cards of every delegate and speaker, I came here to learn and belong. Unaffiliated with any educational establishment or publication, I was hungry for instructions on structural editing, the craft of writing, and most of all, inspiration and encouragement to push me forward.
It was easy to strike up a conversation and find a lunch date. After years of conferencing, I had trained myself to walk into a sea of strangers, introduce myself, and focus on the other person. For three days, my conversation with strangers began like this:
“Hi, my name is Anne. Is this seat taken?”
“What are you working on?”
At first, I defined myself as a wannabe writer of memoirs, as creative nonfiction is the closest thing to the sort of factual reporting and blogging familiar to me. I complained that writing fiction is extremely difficult because I find it impossible to deviate from what’s real. As I try hard to be accurate in my writing, I feel disloyal to fabricate or veer from the truth.
To join the conversation of fiction writers I kept meeting at the conference, I shared my latest venture of tweaking what started as a true story, bending the facts and speculating about a future. It was an April Fool’s story turned awry, for someone identified himself and threatened legal action.
One of the writers I told this mishap to advised me to skip my final session “writing memoir: or, how to take your most private, painful story, shape it into a cohesive narrative and send it out into the world” and go to Alexander Chee‘s session instead. At “writing an autobiographical novel”, the Maine-based author of “Edinburgh” and “Queen of the Night” said, “The libel test is if a stranger reads it and identifies the characters.” He also made me think hard about the freedom of fiction.
“If you base your novel on what happened to you, there will always be blind spots you aren’t aware of and can’t control. On the other hand, you have full control over what you invent.”
Can I avoid the friction of fiction by freeing myself to indulge in the playground of my imagination? Change my characters so that they are no longer recognisable? A surfer with a sagging beer belly? A grieving widow with acne and sciatica? A gold digger pretending to be in love with her teacher? A closet chef hidden behind a thick mustache?
On the second day of the conference, I walked fifteen minutes late into Mary Carroll Moore‘s “Your Book Starts Here: Build a Successful Structure for Your Manuscript in Any Genre” because of my lunch conversation with a mystery writer I had met the previous day. Ms Moore drew a big W on the flip chart and asked us to write the five points of our storyboard on five yellow post-it notes. She told us to start with the last and fifth event (the resolution) and then go back to points one and three, the first triggering incident, also known as the false agreement. While I was busy scribbling my story, she asked us to tear off a scrap piece of paper and enter our names for a book raffle. To my surprise, I won her book.
Apart from one session that did not apply or interest me, every session I had chosen was fretfully interesting. I learned the importance of writing to make the reader see in Annie Weatherwax‘s “Creating Pictures with Words: How and Why Visual Writing Works.” Although I had already practised rousing the reader’s five senses in Paul Wood‘s creative writing class on Maui, I had not appreciated the impact of mirror neurons and visual artists’ keen sense of observation. Weatherwax’s novel “All We Had” caught my attention, and I promptly watched the movie made from the book on Netflix the next night.
Every speaker and teacher who presented at the conference are published authors with teaching experience, some offering writing retreats in exotic places like the Greek islands. They told humbling stories of what they had to do to write, amid the numerous rejections and paranoia of failure after the first success. The final keynote session of four author panellists “Selling Out without Selling Out” was most revealing. The message was clear: don’t give up.
I didn’t think I was a writer until I joined the standing ovation for the first keynote speaker. The Korean American author of “Pachinko” spoke without fear about what we all felt about our art. “You have to care deeply about what you write to still be truly alive to who you really are.”
Later, two people, independent of each other, congratulated me on my speech and on being authentic. I thanked them but apologised that I was not Min Jin Lee.
UPDATE @25th May 2018: Videos of the keynote speakers at the Muse & Marketplace Conference 2018 can be viewed from Grubstreet’s webpage.
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