I live a life of daily, lusty, creative pursuit. I alternate between quiet hours of writing the next draft of my second novel, reading one of the fascinating books from the stack by my armchair, and sculpting clay at my workbench in the garage. I fill hours each day neck-deep in my art. I do have to pause occasionally and turn to the pedestrian tasks of Gmail or getting a haircut, but the core of life is spent in refining my creative process and reveling in the fruits of my labor.

Here ends the dream. My precious, imagined reality.

My life reads a lot like your life.

At the office Monday through Friday, an 11.5 hour-a-day-commute-included hard-switch between one task and the next. 90 minutes some evenings and 60 minutes others to share between what I might write and read before grabbing a late dinner, cuddling with my wife, packing my lunch, looking at Outlook/Slack, setting up the coffee maker and hitting the pillow for seven-ish hours of sleep before the alarm goes off at 5:30AM. One weekend a month, where there is not some demand on my calendar or the not-to-be-ignored-any-longer need to catch up on personal email, household tasks, and other life-admin, I write and read for stretches that sometimes border on the (dare I say it) luxurious. I will say that I’ve made it a priority to make war with my muffin top by jumping rope or going for a walk once in a while, but I’ve come to grips with the fact that the cause of death on my certificate will read “out of shape.”

No one lives a life where their creative work is central and all else orbits*. Creativity is always pushed to the edges. We’re always tossing the lasso, trying to ring and pull our pursuit back toward the center.

So it goes. Keep the dream alive. Your soul pleads for it.

*For a timely example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/business/tracy-k-smith-poet-laureate.html

We just spent a week in India visiting orphans in such places as Bangalore and Puliangudi. During the trip I wrote in my travel journal about what we were doing and seeing. I attempted to process the place and the people. And language fell short.

It still falls short.

How do you describe orphan boys squeezing your arm and pushing on your skin in fascination with your color?

Creamy brown fingers tickle my pale underarm. Giggles erupt.

How do you describe the traffic patterns?

It’s not driving, it’s dance.

How do you describe the Indian hospitality of a home-cooked meal in the kitchen of an orphanage?

We sit at her table as she brings roasted chicken and rice and ice cream. And she waits till we’re done to eat.

How do you describe driving through your hometown when you return?

All the buildings are laid out as if planned. The grass is green and without litter.

How do you describe a place like India?

It must be seen to be believed.

I wrote the first pages of the first draft of The Confessions of Adam after a stressful evening at a church leadership meeting. I recall very clearly how those paragraphs and that story I’d been thinking so much about fell onto the page, how my anxiety and stress fueled the creation of those initial bits of prose – how my frustration found release late that September evening.

Again I remember after a particularly difficult visit with my Alzheimer’s-addled mother I came home and dumped my bitterness and rage into a prose poem that boiled and popped like a pot of sour stew abandoned on the stove.

There is both solace in, as well as a fuel for, creativity when personal circumstances are most adverse. I know the quality of my work seems to benefit.

It is a well known phenomena that we do our best work when we’re under duress – or when tapping those vats of deep emotion stored up from the past. Put the other way, it seems that  satisfaction with one’s station in life brings a lack of urgency that translates to subpar creative work. The creative edge is dulled when there is relative ease. There is some motor that is revved by adversity, a sobriety that generates higher craft.

But you don’t need to go looking for angst. There’s no role to play here – that of some uni-dimensional Angry or Troubled Artist. You’re human. That is enough. Your creative work is a place to park, to constructively respond to the challenges that come your way – that come our way as humans. It is a strange side benefit that with real conflict comes story. Mere mortals must bottle up their angst. We writers get to load up our sentences with this ammo and fire at will.

Like earning a writing degree, or joining a writers’ group, attending a writers’ conference can be a terrific way to procrastinate and avoid the hard, solitary work of writing. However, assuming you’ve nailed this prerequisite and your writing discipline is in place, the writers’ conference can be a very valuable addition to your writerly life.
I attended my first two writers’ conferences this year. The first was AWP 2018 (https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/) and the second was Taylor University’s Professional Writers’ Conference (https://taylorprofessionalwritersconference.weebly.com/).
Here is what I found:
Exposure. I’m not talking about exposure for my work (although the open-mic was a great opportunity), I mean exposure to the writerly universe. Differing perspectives on craft. How writers, presses, editors, and agents promote their work and interact. A demystification of the industry and a knocking of the gatekeepers from our imagined pedestals.
Challenging Ideas. Talks on craft. Navigating the publishing world. Teaching. Building and maintaining a writing career. You are poked and prodded by lectures and panel discussions that push you to question your work, your approach, and your writerly priorities. The result? You have the opportunity to gauge where you really are in your development as a writer and to build or refresh a vision for where you hope to go, or not go.
Budding Relationships. It is possible, I suppose, to attend a conference and hold a conversation with no one, to float through like a leaf riding a river and drift from opening keynote to closing keynote having avoided speaking with a stranger. But this would take some real effort. Nearly without trying, you find yourself in conversations with people who share your passion, who can and want to help you succeed. Where else can you sign-up for a one-on-one with an editor/agent/publisher, walk up to the table of your favorite press, or chat with representatives from a university writing program?
So register and go. You’ll have a list like this one.