Who is this guy in the mirror?
- petersbusiness
- Jun 24
- 2 min read
It’s the morning after the 4th Street writers con in Minneapolis, MN, and…wow.
The thing about these conventions is this: The speakers and panels and presentations are all very interesting, but there are lots of good books out there about the craft of writing. You can spend hundreds of dollars on admission to a convention and thousands on airfare and a hotel room, or you can spend $19.99 on a book.
But.
The thing that makes cons worth it is the stuff in the gaps and margins, the conversations and community building in the interstitial spaces.
4th Street is especially good because the con was designed to really nurture and support all of that. Lunch breaks were two hours long, for example, and they had “Food Ambassadors” holding up signs for different local restaurants at the end of each session. “If you don’t have anyone to have lunch with, now you do,” is what they announced, and groups of half a dozen people would gather around each ambassador. Brilliant!
I’m a shy person. Always have been. I sometimes feel like a “conversational freeloader” when friends are gathered, listening to the conversation but not saying very much. I was shy for the first 24 hours or so of the con, with a niggling worry that I was going to sink into invisibility. I would go home and no one would have even noticed I was there.
The second day, I began announcing whenever I sat down at a table of strangers that I was making a heroic effort to overcome my shyness, and I handed out my new business cards. I asked people what sort of stuff they were writing, I gave the elevator pitch for my novel more times than I could count, and after the first couple of times it started getting easy. Hearing my own voice, I started wondering, Who is this guy? I was feeling unfamiliar inside my own skin, and it was WONDERFUL. It felt like popping out of a chrysalis. I’m not sure who this guy is, but I like him.
The panel discussions about the craft of writing were also really interesting. Then this morning I found the following on Substack:
“Think of your book, not as your baby or the fruit of your creative process or the outpouring of your soul, but as something you have made. Being a writer isn’t so different to being a cabinet-maker or a master luthier or any other kind of craftsperson. It’s expert work and only you can do it in this specific way, but it is work, and when it’s done, you have a product.
“Andrew Carnegie would approve, but then again, so would my miner and dockyard-worker ancestors. Maintaining a separation between your self and your work is a crucial sanity-maintaining strategy in a brutal and changeable world."
And, yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like. Listening to the panels, I was often struck by how much we were sounding like carpenters and machinists rather than artists. But yeah, writing isn’t just inspiration and genius, it’s craftsmanship. We’re artisans at least as much as artists.
And I like it.
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