Real Writers

It’s writers’ conference season again, and this year I’m grateful to be teaching at a bunch of them. And I do mean at them, meaning in a physical classroom with my students rather than staring at them in their little Brady Bunch Zoom boxes on my desktop’s monitor. I’m also grateful for that technology. It’s allowed me teach throughout the pandemic, and it continues to allow me to work with clients all over the world. But I’d forgotten how much I love talking to a classroom or a conference hall full of writers of all ages and genres. This experience simply cannot be replicated virtually.

I certainly miss the laughter. If a joke presents itself in the course of a class or lecture, I will always tell it, and the smiles of muted Zoomers is a pale replacement for the sound a crowd makes when a punchline lands. I have, I know, found myself laughing in a group simply because everyone else is. It is, as they say, infectious – a contagion for which, thankfully, there is no vaccine. I also love chatting with attendees after classes and lectures, hearing their stories, understanding firsthand the staying power of a good talk.

But what I have missed most of all is that unique, alive crackling silence that descends on a crowd when their attention is unified in anticipation. It might appear I am the target of that attention, but in reality, everyone’s focus, including mine, has gone to that place where we all go to write. At most, I directed us all there. This is where we all wait for the good thing that will come next, wait to be surprised and inspired and delighted.

Of course, I go there when I’m at the desk, and I love it, and I’m glad I can do so without the help of air travel or a conference planner, but to feel it so palpably in a high-ceilinged banquet room is humbling and profound to me. This is what we really are, I find myself thinking. This is what we all want. Everything else is a distraction, what we have named reality just because we can all see and hear it.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com