Attending Writers' Conferences
Another terrific way to improve as a writer is to attend writers' conferences. You'll find yourself surrounded by other people hoping to be just as creative and successful as you want to be. You can not only learn from them, you can also build friendships that will help you throughout your career.
There are countless writers' conferences around the world, and you could make a career out of attending them. (Some people do, and end up putting themselves right out of business, like perpetual graduate students who never stop studying long enough to get a job and pay their tuition bills.) No particular conference is necessarily better than the next, but they all offer different angles from which to approach the craft of writing.
You should look for conferences being held by groups that seem to target the kind of writing you want to do. Usually, conferences are a mixed bag of seminars and speeches that may or may not appeal to you. If you can't find at least two interesting seminars or workshops every day of a conference, then you should probably look to attend a different conference.
Some examples of popular writers' conferences include:
American Society of Journalists and Authors Conference, New York: Nonfiction
Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Vermont: Fiction, poetry, and nonfiction
Chicago Writers & Editors/One-on-One, Illinois: Nonfiction
Institute for Travel Writing and Photography, Florida: Nonfiction and photography
Maui Writers Conference, Hawaii: Fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting
As you can see, some conferences are purely for nonfiction writers (the Chicago and New York events are further targeted toward magazine writing instead of books), while other conferences include different disciplines such as fiction writing and screenwriting. Depending on your long-term goals for your writing career, you may choose to attend different types of conferences in any given year, or you might prefer to focus on attending the same conference every year or two as you build friendships and networking opportunities.
Attending Without Attending
In some cases, you can get a lot of the information from a writers' conference without even attending it. More and more conference organizers are making the audio of presentations available on CD after the conferences end, which means that you can order only those sessions you care to hear and listen to them in the comfort of your own home.
You may save a few bucks by skipping a conference fee and instead ordering the audio of a few key sessions, but keep in mind that what you hear on the tape is not all of the information available at writers' conferences. Networking with fellow writers between sessions can give you just as many ideas for improving your craft as listening to a speaker.
The downside to purchasing the audio of a conference is similar to the downside of reading only nonfiction in your area of expertise. You're essentially setting yourself up to hear just a handful of select voices instead of a cacophony from which you might be able to draw interesting new lessons on how to be a better writer.
Making the Most of the Trip
When you do attend writers' conferences, be sure to make the most of the trip by creating your own “events” in between the ones scheduled by the conference organizers. Most writers' conferences take place over long weekends, usually Fridays through Sundays. That means that if you can fly in a day early or stay a day late, you'll have entire workdays free to visit with editors from nearby magazines. If you're attending a conference in a publishing hub such as New York City or Chicago, then you can make an awful lot of face-to-face appointments with editors you already work for or just hope to get to know.
Can you expect an editor you don't know to see you in person?
Yes — as long as you don't request too much time. While an editor you already work with might want to have lunch while you're in town, an editor you haven't yet queried may be willing to meet you at his office for only a few minutes. That's still a literal foot in the door.
Also do your best to make dinner reservations with fellow writers whom you may know from e-mail but have never met in person. Sit back, have a few drinks, and talk in general about your writing career. You never know what kind of mutual connections you can make, or what kind of terrific magazine-writing lessons you can learn based on your fellow writers' experiences.
