Writers’ Conferences 101

Fall and spring in pretty places–that’s pretty much the routine when it comes to holding writers’ conferences, and the Scribblers’ Retreat is no exception!  Held quarterly, the next one is November 10-14  at the King and Prince Beach and Golf Resort –shown here–on gorgeous St. Simons Island, Georgia and will feature historical novelists like Diana Gabaldon and yours truly, along with my publisher, Dominique Riccah, CEO of Sourcebooks.

I just got the promotional material that kindly said:  “Ciji Ware,  veteran of all forms of print and electronic media, will talk about “New Publishing Trends–or–How I Survived as a Scribe.” Certainly a timely topic, given the revolution (and convolutions) going on in the print and publishing worlds, and when a visitor to this site merely clicks from page to page, you can certainly deduce that the main message I probably want to convey is:  keep writing–no matter what!

That is how one gets to be a “veteran.”  As my sainted late father, Harlan Ware, used to say about producing reams of material over his professional writing career, “Writers write.  They don’t make excuses.  They put the seat of their pants on the chair and their hands on the keyboard and they keep typing!”

And if you’re me, you start at about 9a.m. at least five days a week, as you can see from the image of a former (very mess) office on the right.

Maybe “Writers Write” should be inscribed within view of every would-be novelist or scribe.  If you click on the “Ciji’s Covers” page on this site that displays the eight books I’ve written, you’ll see what comes from being consistent. To earn my keep,  I’ve also written  nonfiction, 2 screenplays (neither so far produced), a play (produced in my home town), magazines, news, television, and radio copy, online articles for the web, e-books, e-guides–you name it, I’ve typed it!

I usually mention this when I speak publicly, and offer forth other bits of wisdom from my father who wrote screenplays,novels, a biography, short stories, and for fourteen of its twenty-seven years on the air, the radio classic One Man’s Family: “The best way to be a writer who can pay the light bill is to pretend you work for the phone company. Punch the clock, day in, day out.”

Not every budding writer wants to hear this message of how to survive as a professional scribe.  They want to write “when the spirit moves them….”  or when their head is full of vibrant, fabulous ideas.  And that’s fine, if writing is a hobby.  But if it’s a living, there’s only one way to survive, and that’s to, as they say in the Nike commercial:  “Just DO it!”

When I taught “Writing the First Novel” as an adjunct professor at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program,  I had 17 members in my class, and only one of them finished a book.  The next year when I taught “Writing Women’s Fiction”–same thing. One person completed her manuscript and the rest of the class never crossed the finish line.  I was worried that perhaps I wasn’t a great teacher, but the supervisor running the program looked up my student evaluations and said, “No…you got great marks from your class.  It’s just they never understood how hard it can be to write a book, to say nothing of getting it published.”

Apparently, nearly every lawyer would like to be John Grisham, but few have the stamina to work as hard at the writing craft as Grisham has.  Hundreds of people over the years have said to me, “Oh….I’d love to write a book, if only I had the time,” or “I know a great book that you should write!”

I haven’t spoke to a full-fledged writers conference for quite some time, lecturing mostly these days about my nonfiction work Rightsizing Your Life:  Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most. But now that all my historicals are being reissued with wonderful covers from Sourcebooks Landmark–and my first new historical novel in a decade will be published next April–it’s going to be interesting to see if audiences of fledgling authors who “love to write” have changed at all, especially as it has become tougher and tougher to earn one’s living in the Digital Age.

I’ll let you know how it goes….