Larry M. Coleman

Was it worth it?

One word answer: yes.

There are a lot of people who say writers’ conferences in general are a waste of time and money. “Just write and you’ll learn to do it! You don’t need to go to a conference/workshop/class for that!” I wonder if those are the same people who go to batting cages just waiting to get drafted by their favorite baseball team.

There’s something to be said for learning the craft through doing it. That’s a critical part of it, but it’s not the only part. It’s the reverse side of people who go to a bunch of conferences but never write. (Yes, they exist, too.) One feeds the other. Writing is like sex: sure, you can do it alone your entire life, but you won’t get a whole lot out of it.

This was my first workshop because I have a day job turning jet fuel into noise and happy passengers. After years alone in hotel rooms, reading good books and watching great movies on the laptop, I was filled with excellent works of others, but it was a one-way street. The upside of spending more nights in a hotel than I do at home is that I already have the environment most writers only dream about: a quiet place to myself with zero distractions, since airlines never ask pilots to “take a few flights home to work on in your spare time.”

The job has zero drain on creativity, because “creative” pilots don’t pass checkrides and recurrent training: everything is done the same way by standard operating procedures backed up with checklists and 1000-page manual after manual. All I have to do at the end of the day is change out of my uniform, open the laptop, and tell myself a story, and I started doing that about four years ago after an almost 20-year gap between writing.

Flying is the thing I think about when I’m not writing, and since then, writing has become the thing I think about when I’m not flying. It’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve seen that writing is as much of my life as flying is, but I’ve been doing it so much in the last four years (about 750,000 words over five books) that I feel like I’ve gotten so much better that I’m not getting any better. Seriously, that actually makes sense if you think hard enough about it.

Getting out into a group of other people was a way to fix that. I’ve been to scientific conferences and aviation gatherings before, and I’m always energized and infused with spirit after them, so a writers’ workshop might do the same thing. YWW certainly did, and better than I had imagined.

Why this specific one? There are a million of them. What’s so special about Yale Writers’ Workshop?

Well, first, it’s Yale. Yes, that Yale, not JimBob’s Moonshine and Writing Lalapalooza. Although I wouldn’t know the full extent of it, the fact that they actually require a writing sample that is judged and a $75 non-refundable application fee said to me that they were serious. (It’s an Ivy League school; they’re not funding themselves on fees, but it weeds out the non-serious.) They’re not the only workshop that actually requires admission, but it still raises the bar higher than the piles of them on the internet whose only qualification requirement is having a few hundred bucks in your wallet.

They held to the standards the entire workshop. The submission was judged and a decision given in a week, just as promised. The instructors were highly qualified, the guest speakers informative, the sessions ran exactly on time (if it said 5-6, it meant 5:00 to 6:00), and for every hour of my life I gave up to attend, I got at least an hour and more of value back. This is a high bar to meet for something that costs over $1000 per week.

That cost was something I’d wondered about before it started. Since Yale doesn’t do financial aid for YWW, I thought maybe I’d be surrounded by a bunch of people just like me, a middle-aged white guy who has the luxury of plunking down a large chunk of cash without blinking. Instead, I was relieved to find that there was a wide variety of people and voices. The hurdles didn’t eliminate the diversity; they simply acted as a talent concentrator.

Every person there was serious, excellent, and different. One of the participants during the cross-section mandatory live read session was a Black man who gave the single best live read I’ve ever seen. Ever. I’m glad my read went before his because if it had come after, I’d be reading knowing I could never come close. (And this is coming from me, someone who isn’t shy about public speaking.)

Will I go again next year? Definitely maybe. The only reason it’s not 100% yes is because it succeeded too well for me. I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing Harvard’s Master’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature online at their extension school for the last six months or so. I don’t ever have to go to school again if I don’t want to, and it’s a huge commitment of time, in addition to five figures on a degree I am guaranteed never to use, since a Bachelor’s is a terminal degree for an airline pilot, so it’s been one of those “maybe I will, probably I won’t” ideas. After this workshop, it’s almost certainly going to happen now. I’d love to be in that environment for a long period of time, so maybe by the time next June comes along, I’ll be too busy to do both. If not, I’ll be at YWW again.

If I am, it will probably be with a different instructor. Ethan was an amazing leader, and his comments and critiques saw deeply and quickly exactly what my workshop piece needed. I could tell by his eye that this is someone who really knew what he was talking about, and that mastery was honed by the MFA he had and I didn’t. I gained an appreciation for what grad school can do, hence the likelihood that I’ll be at Harvard Extension soon.

He’s excellent, and if he cloned himself so there were four of him next year, I’d still go. It’s more that I’d like to grow even more with another instructor’s perspective. Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning physicist and a mind on the level of Einstein, told a story in one of his books, Seriously You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (an excellent memoir even for people who know nothing about physics and care even less). When he graduated from MIT, his mentor asked him where he was going to go to grad school. He said, “MIT, of course.” His mentor told him not to: it was much better to go to a different, equally-rigorous university in order to gain a different perspective, see how another school does things, and widen his world. He ended up going to Princeton instead and did his dissertation work under one of the most celebrated physicists in history. It was excellent career and life advice, and I’ll probably end up doing the same thing at YWW on a much smaller scale. There were so many excellent instructors that there are no bad choices.

I think that’s the best answer to whether I thought it was worth it. Next up, the bonus part about Agent Day is coming soon, or catch up on the other two parts here.