Writers are not always the most social beings. We spend so much time alone working on our craft we tend to forget what it’s like to be out in public. I go for weeks without seeing anyone besides the guy in my house I married three decades ago who eats all my Rocky Road ice cream and spends an unsettling amount of time watching professional wrestling. When I finally do get a chance to be out among the crowd, I’m like a German shepherd whose hasn’t seen people in a long while. That’s why I’m a big believer in writing conferences. Being around other writers can improve your mental and emotional health.
A major activity in the life of a writer (or at least this writer for the twenty-five plus years I’ve been writing) is attending conferences or conventions. Surveys distributed at various writing conference around the country and reviewed by the Association of Writers and Writing programs indicate that among the many benefits of attending conferences are learning innovative writing techniques, improving writing skills, finding fresh ideas, and gaining new contacts. I had to sift through several writing conferences before I found the few that were of any real benefit.
I’ve taken part in my fair share of screenwriting conferences. They were more pitch sessions than anything else. Usually held in hotel ballrooms in lovely downtown Burbank, California, hopeful script writers had the opportunity to sign up to pitch their screenplays to people who said they were assistant development heads for various studios when in truth they were really pages for a late-night television show trying to break into the business just like me. I had just won the Nicholl Fellowship Award and was feeling invincible when I attended my first pitch session. The first so-called industry go-getter I met invited me to tell him about my work as he fed berries to the cockatoo on his shoulder. When the bird began squawking, I found it difficult to focus. The session took an immediate nosedive when I suggested the man’s bird might prefer to be in its cage ringing its little bell and staring at its reflection in a mirror.
Then there was the Actor’s Conference, a symposium designed for aspiring actors to connect with professional actors. Before things went south between myself and the owner of the cockatoo, he suggested that attending the Actor’s Conference would help me be a better writer. The idea was that I could learn how to act like the characters I was creating, and that would translate to the page.
The first panel I took part in was an acting exercise with four other pretend thespians. We were to take our place around a poker table and imagine ourselves as dogs playing poker in a velvet painting. I tried, but I couldn’t get into it. First of all, dogs cannot play poker because they don’t have thumbs, and you need thumbs to shuffle and deal a deck of cards properly. And there’s nothing remotely cute about animals with gambling problems. It’s incredibly sad. As a matter of fact, not one of those dogs is smiling in those pictures, because if you look closely at those paintings, you can tell that most of them are playing with money they can’t afford to lose. And sadder still, remember it takes seven of their dollars to make one of ours.
It’s going to be a long winter between writing conferences. In the meantime, I’ll sharpen my people skills at the grocery store where I plan to buy my weight in Rocky Road ice cream.
