Free Range Writers
So first of all, go here if you want to read my article on parenting and gaming. Fun stuff to write, neat magazine to have written it for and all thanks (like so much else in my life these days) to Matt McFarland. (Thank you, Matt!)
So I’ve had some time to process the Writers’ Convention I went to this weekend. I have a notebook full of notes and thoughts and I realize how few of them will actually apply to anything but my own work, this will be ironic soon. (What, ten years of pretending to be a writer, a year or two with a bit of success at it, and NOW I actually think about plot construction for the first time in my life? Yeah, I win the internet.)
The thing that I couldn’t get past most of the time, is how strange the writer is as an animal, especially when it’s free range and face to face with its own species. Curious, occasionally friendly, and by some staggering percentage, utterly unable to think about things outside of the terms of their own needs. (I'm not saying this is a universal truth, just what I observed this weekend.)
Now granted, I’ll give you that all of those writers there spent a few hundred dollars to learn the few things they needed to make their manuscript the next DaVinci Code. I can’t blame them for having their heads pretty far up their own manuscripts. I know I tend to think and relate new information to things I already know or understand, that’s how my brain works, but when I’m in a large learning space I do try to take that information and make it universal. I learn more and others around me do as well. (Did I mention I couldn’t keep my damn mouth shut through most of the workshops? I had a few people, speakers included, thank me, so I guess I wasn’t too obnoxious.)
I also saw a non internet troll. It was fantastic. A grown man in his mid to late fifties. A man who at least pretend to have a real career as a writer, and so you would think he had good things to do with his time and money. Like any internet troll, apparently not. He sat in a class and spent the whole time muttering his side comments to someone beside him. Eventually it got so obvious and irritating that the speaker stopped and asked him what his issue was with what she was saying. Being a troll, he backed off, saying that wasn’t the time and place. Better still, he spent the rest of the day (at least from what I could tell, he was prevalent in the break room) complaining to any and all how he was ‘yelled at’ by one of the speakers. When, after a while, someone who had been in the first class came in to try and still his belly aching a bit, he got up and left saying ‘they just don’t understand the point.’ Classic troll behavior, and best of all, this guy had never even been on the internet! (He’s a letter writer, he explained, dozens of pages of letters a week.) Funny how it never occurred to me that such a thing could exist outside of the net.
There were questions at panels so narrow and specific to a writer’s work that the panelist couldn’t possibly answer it. Loud personal phone calls in public places. More complaining about minutia then you could shake a complaint form at, and of course all of it coming from people who had been to this conference a dozen times before and would go a dozen times again, age permitting.
Don’t get me wrong, I ran into a lot of people who were just fantastic, people who I hope to some day call peers. There’s one young lady who has, no kidding, ACTUALLY done something new with the standard vampire novel, and I am dying to be her pal when she’s rich and famous. I had a blast and learned things at every turn, but then, that’s what I wanted out of that conference. I wonder if I’d gone into it wanting to ‘fix’ my manuscript or land an agent or find something to complain about, that’s just what I would have found.
Long ramble short, really, ladies and gentleman, have fun if you’re going to go. If not, I’m sure you can find things at home to bitch about.