For the past week I’ve been at a writing conference, which really is more like an adult sleep away camp for people devoted to writing, whether as career writers and teachers of writing, or as a call they can’t help but answer, a passion they squeeze in to lives complicated by jobs and families and all the obligations and distractions of dailiness.

The Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Summer Writers’ Conference is a special place in the world of summer writing conferences.  I know that not only because I’ve been here twice now, and spent a week many years ago at Breadloaf for comparison, but also because others here all say the same thing.  This is where people come to improve their craft and get support for the often lonely and scary act of writing, not to show off what great writers they already are.

“This is a populist writing conference,” celebrated novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III said yesterday during an interview with VCFA President Thomas Greene, a novelist himself.  “There’s no stratification here.  We’re all just writers and we all hang out together, whether participants or faculty.”

“I’ve been to Sewanee (one of the prestigious summer writing conferences, held in Tennessee every summer) and honestly, the work of the writers there isn’t as good as what all of you are writing,” said Andy two nights ago at dinner.  Andy is one of the writers in the novel workshop I attended, led with great enthusiasm and wisdom by Andre.

One feature of the conference is readings every night by faculty members, top-notch writers who can leave a room stunned, as Patricia Smith did after reciting a long poem in the voices of mothers whose black sons have been killed by police.  She was followed by Lee Martin who read a short story that rode a wave of mounting tension before breaking open at the end with heartbreaking clarity about the follies inherent in being human.

There’s also a participants’ reading every day, with each person having five minutes.  The writing is more often stunning than not.  “Damn, these people can all write,” I’ve thought all week as I sat and listened.

The conference feels like camp because while it’s rigorous and serious about writing as authentically and deeply as possible, it’s also a lot of fun. Everyone you talk to gets the part of you that sits down at your computer or journal or pad of paper every chance you get. You discuss and critique and listen and write.  This morning’s generative writing workshop used a table full of yard sale items as the basis for prompts to get us writing, whether poems or essays or stories or the beginning of a book. Ellen Lesser, writer, conference director and leader of the workshop, talked about the energy she could feel in the room as 40 people flashed their pens across the pages of notebooks.

I almost didn’t attend.  With Chris so ill it seemed superfluous to go to Vermont to work on my novel.  How could that possibly count as much as being with my sister and helping her family manage her increasing illness and disability?  What difference does it make whether or not I ever figure out how to knit my writing into a coherent, book-length narrative, a story that will bring characters I’ve created to life and keep readers turning the page to find out what happens to them?

The only possible answer to that question is that it matters to me, because the stories in this novel, and in the memoir I put aside last summer, are calling to me.  This week is going to help me answer that call, and to remember that the urge to create is worthy in itself.  It’s not about accomplishment and publication (though I’ll certainly take as much of that as I can get) when you get at the root of why any of us write.  It’s that we can’t not write, so we might as well get as good at it as we can.

Grind:  To crush or pulverize; to polish, sharpen or refine by friction; to rub or bear down on harshly; to oppress or weaken gradually; to operate by turning a crank; to produce mechanically and without inspiration; to instill or teach by persistent repitition.

Or, to write every day.  I’m Grinding this month for the fourth time.  The Grind is a commitment to writing something every day for a month and sending whatever you’ve written to your co-Grinders.  You can only get into the Grind via invitation, and you can only be invited by someone who has successfully done a full month of the Grind without missing a day.

Created by poet Ross White, the Grind creates a virtual writing accountability community. You get sent a link to a website where you sign up for the coming month and choose the category of writing you want to do:  new or revised poetry, new or revised prose, or manic mix, which means write whatever you want.

But you must write!  Ross organizes writers into groups of 10 or so according to genre, then emails out the group assignments.  There are only two rules: you must write something everyday and email it to the others in your group by midnight of whatever time zone you’re in, and you must not share any writing that’s sent to you without permission. This is not a feedback group.  You don’t critique what’s sent to you, you don’t even have to read it.  It’s just about writing and sending.

Simple, and profound.  I’ve never known anyone in my Grind groups, though I do read their bios, which come with the group assignments.  But I’m responsible to them — they are expecting something from me in their inbox every day, as I expect something from them.  Someone is paying attention to whether or not I write.  Or more importantly, I’m paying attention to whether or not I write every day, because I’ve made that commitment to a group of strangers.

I don’t think Grinding is producing “mechanically and without inspiration.”  I think it’s more teaching “by persistent repitition.”  Mostly it’s “to polish, sharpen or refine by friction.”  The friction of making sure I get some words on to the screen and out in to the world everyday.  Friends I’ve invited in to the Grind talk about the value of paying attention to language and creativity for at least a tiny part of each busy day.  One friend hasn’t missed a day of Grinding since January and talks about how it’s fundamentally changed her relationship to her practice of writing.

Grinding is practice and practice is essential to any craft.  So I polish, sharpen, refine, Grind.

I’ve recently been corresponding via email with a friend who is fairly new to personal writing.  He’s sent me a couple drafts of a memoir essay he’s working on, asking for feedback and general thoughts about what is and isn’t working in the piece.  Reading his essay and framing my thoughts has been helpful to my own writing because it’s another way of looking at a collection of words and thinking about what arrangement would best work to pull in a reader and create associations that will resonate.  It’s doing what I’ve told him is the most important thing he can do to improve his writing.  Keep writing and read, read, read.  In other words, practice.

When we think about a musician getting better as an artist, we expect that he or she would practice, whether it’s hours spent at the piano or the guitar or the flute.  We wouldn’t expect a painter to be a good painter the first time oil met canvas.  The same with a dancer or singer of photographer.  But I think writing is often seem more as a talent — you’re either good or you’re not.  That may be true to some extent, but even if you’re naturally good, you’re not going to get better without practice.

Perhaps it’s that writing practice is often all the drafts of a story or novel or poem that no one but the writer ever sees.  Will the 36,347 words I’ve logged so far in this year’s NaNoWriMo amount to anything, or the more than 72,000 total words of the novel so far? Does the instant publication gratification of writing a blog post deem the words written any more worthy than words that fill my journals no one will ever read?  What about the boxes of old poems and stories and manuscripts stored in the barn, or the full file drawer in my study.

In a way, none of that matters.  It’s all practice.  Besides NaNoWriMo, I’m also doing The Grind this month, a practice-based endeavor that the writer Ross White organizes.  Ross sorts Grinders in to groups by genre (poetry or prose, new or revised, or manic mix, which is the group I keep choosing and I don’t want to think too deeply about what that says about me) 10 or 12 per group, then sends everyone each other’s email and you’re responsible to send a new piece of writing every day to each other via email.  You don’t comment on each other’s work or even acknowledge it.  This isn’t about feedback or workshopping, it’s about being accountable to other people, strangers in fact, to practice each day by writing.

Pairing NaNoWriMo and The Grind has worked out well, because I’m working on the novel almost every day.  On days when I don’t get to the novel, I write a poem to send my sister and fellow grinders, or send the revision of a poem I’ve just edited, or a fragment of essay, anything that makes me practice my writing.  I’m getting a lot of practice this month, and I have faith that it’s all going to make me a better writer if nothing else.

Writing this blog has been good practice, practice about practice.  How meta.

Yes, I’m doing it again, participating in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. My first NaNoWriMo was in 2011, when I met the challenge of writing 50,000 words in the 30 days of November.  NaNoWriMo was launched in 1999 when a group of 21 writers got together and decided to each try to write a novel in a month.  The idea has been growing ever since and last year over 300,000 adults and almost 90,000 young writers participated.  Clearly, deadlines and a sense of community, even if virtual, works for writers. One of the best reasons the website listed for writing a novel when I took part three years ago was that finishing a novel allowed you to change your “I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” line at parties to “I wrote a novel.”  True, I’ve used that line.

I didn’t completely finish my novel in November 2011, though I wrote over 50,000 words, and I finished the novel a month later.  And it wasn’t exactly a novel either.  I wrote a very marginally fictionalized account of a family situation that had happened the summer before.  It felt more like transcribing an experience, with different names for the characters, than imagining and writing a story.  I suspect it’s not a particularly compelling novel, because I’ve never even read it myself.

Now I’m writing a novel that is completely fiction and it’s more fun than I could have imagined.  After the fairly soul-wrenching work of the memoir I spent much of the last six months pulling into shape, I needed a break.  A decent draft of the memoir is waiting for me to make the next set of edits.  But before I go back into the sad and anxious time in my life the memoir recounts, I wanted to write something like the well-crafted but decidedly not-heavy novel I read just as I was finishing the last draft of the memoir.  “That’s what I want to write next,” I said to myself when I finished The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

Before I left for Europe, I had the idea of writing a novel about a young woman traveling, visiting the places I went on my recent trip.  My idea of working on the novel while I was traveling and able to recount details of the places I stayed quickly fell aside in favor of just experiencing those places.  As a friend said to me in Europe, “You don’t need to be writing now.  You’re doing your research.”

That was a good enough excuse for me, and actually, it wasn’t an excuse.  Now as I’m writing, when I need facts and real experiences from Normandy or Amsterdam or Provence, my research brain is there to provide the details.

What’s fun about this novel is experiencing the delicious excitement of writing fiction, not fictionalized fact.  When I sit down at the computer every day to write the next few scenes, I don’t know what’s going to happen, what new secrets are going to pop out, what my characters will do and what they’ll say.  In fact, I’m just getting to know my protagonist and I’m 36,000 words in to the novel.  But that makes sense, right?  You don’t get to really know someone when you first meet her.  It takes awhile, like 36,000 words worth of awhile.

Being already 36,000 words in to the novel, does that mean I’m only going to write 14,000 words in November?  No, my plan is to write another 50,000 words, because that should be enough for me to finish the novel.  I want a first draft of the novel done by the end of December so I can get back to work on the memoir.  Trying to work on both isn’t working. My head is firmly in this novel — I think about the characters as I move through my day, plot ideas drift through my mind (though very rarely translate in to what actually happens when I sit down to write), and when I go in to my study and shut the door for my uninterrupted hours of writing, finding out what happens next to Cecelia and her friends Nina and Sally is all I want to do.

So, I’m doing it.  Fifty thousand words in 30 days, starting tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it goes.