Workshops and Conferences

My mind is turning to writing workshops and conferences right now because I just finished teaching in an intensive three-day writer’s conference and am preparing to teach a mystery writing workshop tomorrow night and another the next week. So I’m in teacher mode about writing at this moment.

When I’m not teaching, I’m usually in student mode. I learn from every book I read, including the bad ones. (Nothing is more effective than seeing first-hand where some bad practices and techniques can take you.) I learn from my writer friends in the blogosphere, on Twitter, and on Facebook. I learn from my publisher/editor husband and friends who are also editors. If I’m smart, I even learn from my dog. (When he’s awake, he’s cheerful and excited about life. When he can’t be cheerful and excited, he goes to sleep. Good lesson for me there.)

When I’m teaching, I find it interesting to see how important the student’s attitude is to the amount they learn. At the writer’s conference I mentioned, we had thirty-nine students who were eager to learn and willing to work hard to make the most of the opportunity of having ten successful professional writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing offer them what these writers had spent years learning. (One of the exciting things about the design of this conference is the low student-to-teacher ratio.) One student came late, missed sessions, didn’t bother to do half the writing exercises, and spent most of his time (and too much of everyone else’s) arguing with whoever was teaching at the moment. What a waste of a great opportunity!

Anyone who teaches knows that we don’t really teach anyone anything. We make available information, techniques, strategies, and craft that we have discovered through our own education and experience of working in the field. The student learns through the use s/he makes of what we offer. The old idea of teaching as a kind of opening the head of the student and pouring knowledge in is useless and silly. The student who learns is the student who wants to learn and who is willing to do the work of learning.

After many years of working and teaching in a university, I coined the term “young Turks” to describe the (usually but not always) male grad student who attacks all the other students any time they dare to open their mouths and wants to impress the professor with how much he knows already. Such a student doesn’t learn much, I’m afraid. 

I look instead at the other thirty-nine students of our conference who came on time or often early, listened carefully, asked questions to learn more, did the work, and took advantage of the great opportunities to pick the faculty’s brains at breakfast, lunch, and breaks. One woman told me how she works three part-time jobs to support herself and her two small children and how she can only write after working all day, feeding her kids, bathing them, and reading them to sleep. But she writes at least two hours every night nonetheless. And she made the sacrifice of money and time to attend this conference and learn more. She came early and stayed late, even though she had to go home and take care of her kids still—and she brought in two manuscripts for critique rather than the one that was required.

Guess which of the two students I’ve described is going to make it as a writer. My money’s on the hard-working, eager-to-learn-more woman struggling to make ends meet rather than the guy who couldn’t be bothered to show up half the time and was sure he knew more than anyone else there.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been studying and working at writing for over 50 years. I still have so much to learn, and I try to learn something every day, if I can. No matter how much success I may eventually have as a writer, I suspect I will keep finding new things to learn about the art and craft until the day I die. What do you feel about teaching and learning? Where do you look to learn what you need to know about the art and craft of writing?