My MISFIT

"The personal essay is an excuse for bad fiction-writers to publish." So said Eric Miles Williamson, editor of Pleiades, at one of the conference sessions I attended last week. I'm not sure what use to make of that statement, but I must have felt it was important because I wrote it down in my notebook, along with this from the same source: "If you want to get a bad story published, call it an essay."

After three days in Atlanta, my notebook is full of such little nuggets of--well, I don't know whether "wisdom" is the right word. I know it's not terribly wise to write down all these notes and haul them home if I'm not going to make anything of them, so today I think I'll make a Miscellany of Ideas that Seemed Fairly Important at the Time (MISFIT):

I'm already tired of the word "poignant." (Source: me, after only half a day of conferencing!)

Eighty percent of what we need to know about writing fiction comes from poetry. (Source: Walter Mosley, who dressed dramatically all in black--black suit, black dress shirt, black hat, black high-top sneakers--and also said that history is a lie but writing a novel is our best chance to get to the truth.)

Picture a thousand poets trying to shove into the same elevator while mumbling the mantra "my publisher, my publisher" and you will have a good sense of the scene in the Hilton lobby Friday night. (Source: me, with a little help from my friends.)

"Etiquette is the death of religion." (Source: someone on a panel about writing faith for the faithless, which attracted a standing-room-only crowd roughly evenly divided between those who looked like Mormon missionaries and those who looked like they'd just dropped in after a long morning of threshing wheat at the Holistic Living Commune, except it's the wrong time of year to be threshing wheat.)

That's about it. Everything else is either illegible or incoherent. I suppose I could put all these insights together and call it a personal essay, but what would Eric Miles Williamson think?