The joys of losing

So, I didn't win the NSAL competition, but it was an interesting experience. I met a lot of really wonderful and talented writers, plus everyone involved in the organization is just so sweet and charming. The judges of the contest were Lauren Groff, Larry Leichman, and Bill Luvaas.

Lauren and Larry had an interesting back and forth going, because Lauren is a staunch supporter of literary writing, and Larry (he works for a publishing company) was more interested in telling us how to make money (even if that means writing genre). They got into it a little bit during the Master Class we took on Saturday morning.

Bill was pretty quiet during the whole thing, but he definitely fell on Lauren's side.

The audience (yes, there was an audience for the class) asked us what we wanted to do with our lives, and how we wanted to fit writing into our lives (this was a question based pretty solidly on Lauren and Larry's argument). I wanted to be eloquent. I tried. I don't think, however, that it came out right.

This is something like what I said (don't worry, for veracity's sake I'm going to liberally sprinkle in likes): My dad's been a writer for like 45 years, and I think that part of me rebelling was like thinking I didn't want to write and trying not to write, but I've always just kind of written anyway. I'm lucky in that I teach and I love it. But like writing for me isn't really a need, it's something of me, like how my fingernails grow?

And then people came up to me later and said stuff like "Oh well, you didn't win, but that's okay because you love teaching!"

And this is true and not true. Of course I didn't think I would win, and at the same time I was disappointed not to win. And yes, I love teaching with all my heart, but I don't love writing any less than that, you know? I think I have trouble being sincere with people, especially when "people" means an audience. I just don't really have it in me to stand up in front of a room of people and say "I love this thing so much" (this, incidentally, is one of the reasons I spent about an hour of my wedding crying; it's difficult for me to make such private things public).

But! I suppose that's what I'm doing now, eh? Making something very private as public as it can be? This is one of the reasons I love writing. I can take my time and say what I want to say in exactly the way I want to say it. I think that's a beautiful thing. Not that I'm so very eloquent, but at least I have the chance to try to say the thing I want in the way I want it to be said.

All in all, it was quite an intense and quite probably life altering experience.