I got to watch a changing of the guard this weekend.

It wasn’t really expected, not from this group of literary writers and
memoir novelists. I watched the the cult change masters from the tried
and true, the well known writing master to the shiny shiny up and
comer. Now, as analogies go, that’s probably not accurate, the up and
comer published his first novel 25 years ago, but the old school guy
has his publication date beat by an additional 30 years at least, so
we are talking relative values.

Friday afternoon, day one of the conference (www.lajollawritersconference.com/ljwc) is always a trifle slow.
It’s a Friday. You have to dance on the special edge of hard-core to
start a conference on a Friday afternoon, I don’t care if you’re a
retiree or work at the local Quick-ee Mart. It’s got to be your
passion, your compulsion that makes that happen. So on Friday there’s
prolly five of us in the room, always a choice situation because even
though this conference is adorably small, there is always a certain
amount of forwardness required which is, quite honestly, something hat
must be practises for us creative types. Interestingly enough, the
first lecture was on the craft of writing. Not about how to self-
publish and screw the man, not about how to rip down all the
conventions. He was talking about the art and craft of writing. And he
really knew his craft.

We’re not a bunch of neophytes here. This conference attracts the
experienced, the people who LOVE to read, love to write, not the
hedonistic percieved quality of being a writer but who love the
literality of sentence structure, love the purposeful aplication of
trigger words, the rhythm and flow of language as it pattrs onto the
page. Rookie mistakes are few and far between and arrogant F**ktards
need not apply.

As the conference moved into day 2, the crowd grew. At privious years
I had seen the same group of people in session after session listening
to the same writer of choice, and they began to show the same devotion
to the New Guy. The room filled up, people had to take the “cheap
seats” by the door to stand and listen. Thing is, the observations of
these two men, the old and the new were not so different. They both
ranted about the abuse of adverbs and cautioned about the seductive
death of the passive voice, the importance of that hook, the first
sentence that drags you into the second and the third. The paragraph
that makes the reader turn from the back-flap to the first page.

So why the attraction? I was watching the lure of the new, of a
classic message repackaged so that people who knew the lines by heart
were being inspired to listen afresh. By the end of the conference,
the new guys room was packed. Not just with the people lured in after
the had their fill of old favorites, but with the same people who had
shown up to hear him speak on day one, session one, they just kept
going back and while the material was retrod, the dynamic was not, the
way the group acted and interacted was different every time, because
each group was asking different questions, they were actively pushing
the session out of the bounds of the catalogue write-up. It really
drove home how powerful these small conferences can be, where you
don’t have to stand in line to shake the hand of someone you aspire to
stand alongside, you are not one of 400 people sitting in a university
sized lecture hall, waiting to be hand-fed snippets of wisdom form the
masters.

This is an interactive, irreproducible experience, the dynamic of the
group and the dynamic of the teacher/writer have the potential to feed
off one another and turn what started out as a classromm situation
into a true critique session, with questions and commentary from all
sides of the room and true feedback (not the snarky-ass stuff you may
have run across in College, but TRUE critique, given from someone who
is really, honestly giving you their opinion, not because THEY are
RIGHT, but because you made them feel something strongly enough for it
to bounce back at you).