This is really aimed at Clarion attendees, but feel free to extrapolate out to any intense writing workshop you have to apply to get into and re-arrange your life to attend.
You got in. Congratulations. Now you’re arranging your work time off, or you’re picking clothes to pack, and everything is amazing and you are braced for the experience of your life.
Here are some words I wish someone had told me:
It will all be very normal.
You won’t be a new, friendlier, more loveable you. You won’t be the stand-out star of the class. You won’t change in clear, easily-definable ways.
The work will still be work. The friendships will still be work. You’ll still have insecure panic attacks that everyone likes each other more than they like you.
And that is all okay.
It won’t matter when it’s time to go home that your roommate barely looked at you while other roommates were besties instantly. You will all messy-cry on each other on the last night and promise to be best friends forever.
Some of you will be best friends forever. I know people who met their spouse at a workshop. But most of you will not be besties forever.
You will drift apart over the next five years, and that, too, is okay. You will all share this magical moment, this trip to Narnia, taken together, and if you run into each other at a convention or on the street, there will be a sharp, beautiful moment of recognition, that you have both been to a place that changed you forever.
Like all of life’s big changes, you won’t see how it changed you, or even that it changed you, until years later, until moments like that reunion, where you can share memories of who you had been.
You will mourn, when the workshop is over. You will feel it was less ordinary than it was, the people more extraordinary than they were. Many people end up unable to write for a while after the workshop, and that is okay, too.
Me, I hit the ground running, afraid that if I didn’t thrash my experience into gold it would vanish forever and become meaningless.
I don’t regret that mad productivity, though I do regret the flagellating thoughts behind it.
Yes, I suppose I’m saying, “You will not be changed forever. You will be changed forever.” It is both and it is neither. But for right now …
You got in. Congratulations. Remember to savor this. Set an alarm or a note or a calendar event – fifteen minutes of savoring, every morning, in whatever form savoring is sweetest for you.
