Write from the Deep

Attending a writers’ conference can be intimidating, even overwhelming. If you want to make the most of your time at a writers’ conference, guest Grace Fox has some specific strategies to help you do exactly that. And some of them are even about your writing.

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Grace Fox

Grace Fox is a popular speaker at women’s events internationally. She inspires hope, courage, and transformation through God’s Word. She has served as a career missionary for more than 30 years. Grace has written fourteen books and published hundreds of articles in magazines. She’s a member of the First 5 Bible Study writing team for P31 Ministries and is a co-host for a podcast called Your Daily Bible Verse. Her book, Finding Hope in Crisis: Devotions for Calm in Chaos, won the Golden Scroll Devotional Book of the Year Award in 2021. Keeping Hope Alive: Devotions for Strength in the Storm won the same award in 2022. Her newest devotional is titled Names of God: Living Unafraid. You can learn all about her at GraceFox.com.

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Erin Taylor Young: Welcome listeners into the Deep. Today is part two of our interview on writers’ conferences with Grace Fox, and we are discussing specific strategies for making conferences work for you.

Karen Ball: So when writers attend conferences, what is helpful and what isn’t?

Well, many writers wonder why they should spend the money to attend a writers’ conference if they don’t get a contract from it. How do they justify the expense to a spouse? Or maybe you think, “I’m ready to be published. I’ve got this,” but what if the professionals at the conference don’t agree?

Haven’t they just wasted all that money for nothing?

Grace Fox: Absolutely not, because attending conferences is about growing relationships with those very professionals. It’s about laying a strong foundation for your career. You go to conferences to learn as much as you possibly can about the craft of writing. Which means you have to go in with a teachable spirit. To say, “I’m here to learn,” and take in as much as you can. That’s the first strategy.

But conferences––all those workshops––can feel like information overload at times, so the next strategy is to tell yourself it’s okay to skip out on a workshop if you need to decompress. It’s so helpful to take time to get your notes in order and to get your thoughts put together again, or to just go to your room and have a quiet time and pray.

With that in mind, it’s always a good idea to have friends praying for you as attend the conference. Because you don’t know what God’s purpose is for having you go there.

Karen Ball: Exactly! Sometimes He calls you to go to a writer’s conference and it has nothing to do with your writing career. It has to do with you meeting people who get you on the right track as far as your perspective, understanding that God may be calling you to write something for one person, and if you write something and only one person reads it and it changes that person’s life, it’s worth it. The expense is worth it. The investment is worth it. It’s all worth it because you’re doing what God has asked you to do.

Grace Fox: That’s beautiful. It really is about obedience. And in my career with writing, I’ve met so many people who think that end all is writing a book—gotta write a book. Gotta write a book. But one thing I learned at a conference is that that there is a huge audience out there with magazines.

Think about it. Your book may only sell 2000 copies in its lifetime. But one magazine article can reach a quarter of a million people. You don’t know those things unless you start going to conferences and learning from those people that are in the know.

Karen Ball: That’s why it’s so important to get your expectations straight, to go in with an open mind and an open-hearted spirit and say, “What is it you want from me, Lord?” Not, “What are You going to give me, Lord?,” but “What do You want from me?”

Grace Fox: Because His plan may be to put you on the bridge to something entirely different.

Erin Taylor Young: You know, I love, Grace, how supportive your husband was. He justified the expense because God told you to go. And I love what you said about it being an education. I mean, people go back to school all the time and nobody questions that expense to pay for a class or whatever. This is the same thing. You’re paying for a lot of classes. And believe me, it’s cheaper than college tuition!

Grace Fox: Amen. And again, the relationships that you make at conferences can last for years. I am still friends with some of the women that I met in 1999. We still communicate and [00:08:00] support each other in our writing.

Erin Taylor Young: Well, I met Karen at a writing conference.

Karen Ball: Exactly. And so much came out of that, even beyond publishing Erin’s book, Surviving Henry. It’s amazing what God can accomplish if we’re open to letting Him do his will and bring about His plans instead of ours.

And Grace, I loved what you said in part one of this interview about not stopping until God tells you to.

Grace Fox: That was a quote from Matt Anderson.

Karen Ball: We all need to remember that, especially when we experience what you did, Grace. Where you told us in the first part of this podcast that you were so sure when you went to that first conference that you had everything down, that you were ready to be published, and you weren’t. Or when we’re’re told that we need to learn how to do this or this or this better…

That that can be just devastating.

But from the editor’s side of the desk at writer’s conferences, I can say met a lot of wonderful writers, but not very many who were ready, at that moment, to be published. Writers have to spend time studying, writing, and learning the craft.

And so if you go to a writer’s conference and they’re telling you that you need to do this and this and this, don’t look at that as something depressing. And don’t let it make you want to give up! Look at that as your orders, your marching orders. Don’t stop writing until God tells you to do so.

Grace Fox: That’s right because we want to do what God’s called us to do with excellence.

Erin Taylor Young: So, Grace, you were digging in and learning everything you could, and when you learned about articles, you explored that as a way to hone your craft. And to learn how to write to deadline. And you were building a reputation amongst editors.

Karen Ball: One caution though, again from the editor’s side of the desk. We’re talking about making professional connections, and that’s great. But it was obvious to me when someone came to talk to me or sit at my table during a meal, and it was just to make a connection with an editor. It wasn’t because they cared anything about me as a person, or they were looking at me as an individual, or that God had asked them to sit next to me. It was that they thought talking to me was a strategic connection.

It’s not about “connections” so much as relationship. The people that I met at these conferences, who shared passions for the things that I had passions for, who came to me with a teachable spirit like you’re talking about…

Those are the people who are still in my life because they know me so well and they know God so well and we can speak truth to each other and encourage and challenge each other. So focus more on building relationships. Just ask God who He wants you to meet. He’s got His reasons for directing you where He does.

Erin Taylor Young: Yeah, I love that. Especially because there are some conferences editors can’t always control who their appointments might be with. But it’s lovely to just have someone come along and just chat with you, to just to talk about what’s happening in the writing world or even just to visit.

Grace Fox: So another wise strategy is to watch your attitude when you approach the editors. Always remember, they are people as well who may be dealing with hard things, who may have just had a tragedy in their family, but here they are back at work. We just don’t know. So be careful, if an editor looks disinterested, that it may have nothing to do with you or your writing. Maybe they’re a little preoccupied because they’ve got something personal going on.

There are all kinds of dynamics that happen at a conference, so purpose to be sensitive to those dynamics, whether with editors or the other attendees. Some are discouraged. Oh my goodness! I’ve been at conferences where a writer gets a rejections and that person is in tears. So go in as someone who’s willing to minister as well as be ministered to.

Erin Taylor Young: Just know that God might send you to a writing conference for something that you can offer to someone else––some thought, some prayer, some who knows what, and word of encouragement––and you might be there for that.

And that’s still being obedient and still being used by God and still contributing. To the overall words of truth going forth in, in this world. We can contribute even if we don’t write a word. What if we encouraged somebody who then wrote something that that just took off? Changed people’s lives? God is so much bigger than we realize.

Karen Ball: So let me recap some strategies or going to writer’s conferences that we’ve hit on here. First of all, make sure you go to conferences because God is calling you to do so. If you need to justify the expense, you can honestly say that God is calling you to this, that this is an investment in what He’s asking you to do.

The next strategy is to check your expectations at the door. We talked about false expectations, why not go with no expectations beyond asking God what He wants to show you?

Erin Taylor Young: Right. Go in with an open heart and mind and spirit.

Grace Fox: And ask him for those divine appointments.

Erin Taylor Young: Those are so much fun when they happen!

Karen Ball: Next, check your ego at the door. Be teachable. Don’t feel as though people are rejecting you when they say you’re not ready. What they’re really saying is you can do better. That actually is a form of belief in you, and so take it as such and let it nurture you and nourish you and move forward in what you’ve been shown and taught.

Erin Taylor Young: That brings up an important point. It’s difficult sometimes for a new writer to get that meeting she wanted, or have a critique done, and see red pen all over. But the deal is this: published writers, career writers, still get red pen all over their work!

As an editor, Karen has put red pen all over manuscripts. I have too. There are multi-published authors who’ve had a 30-page revision letter from me! That doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer and it doesn’t mean that you should be discouraged. It’s just a normal part of the process.

Karen Ball: We writers all need editors. When I’m functioning as a writer, I love getting those letters from my editor. I don’t always agree with everything that they suggest, but I know that what they are saying is, this is good, but you can do better. And it’s because of their belief in who I am as a writer.

So when editors at these conferences say this isn’t quite what we need, but have you considered, and then they give you guidance, that’s because they believe in you.

Grace Fox: When I went to that first writer’s conference. I should have checked my ego at the door. I wrote three sample devotions to be critiqued by an editor of a beautiful women’s devotional magazine. I sat at her table one meal and she recognized my name. She said, “Oh, I read some of your stuff.” And I’m thinking, oh yeah, here we go. And then she said, “They were okay, but they’re just too long for our publication.”

My devotionals were 800 words, and she was looking for something more like 350 to 400. But she said, “I know you can cut them down and get them down to 350 or 400 words.”

I had the gall to say, “I don’t think so.” She said again that I could, and I just said no. That I couldn’t do that and maintain the integrity of the piece.

Needless to say, I’ve never written for her. And why would she want me to? Talk about ego!

But I ended up at the airport with a different editor whose flight was at the same time as mine. I told her about that meeting, and she said, “Show me what you submitted.” So I pulled out that first devotion and slid it across the table to her. She butchered it with red ink. She took the second one and did it again. And when she got to the third one and started in with her red pen, I was just dying by that point.

But I went home with those devotions all marked up in red pen, and I did what she said. She showed me how to cut things down from 800 words to 350. And the integrity of the piece was still there!

Now? I have a hard time going bigger because I know how to write tight.

Erin Taylor Young: That’s grace right there. That is a God-gift that this editor, after you wouldn’t listen, did that for you. One of the neat things about all this? We have all made mistakes, mistakes, mistakes, mistakes, and guess what? Our careers did not die. One mistake is not going to ruin your career.

So be okay with direction. With correction. We’re gonna learn, we’re gonna make mistakes, and we’re gonna be humble about it and, and then follow advice.

Karen Ball: Grace, do you have any final words of wisdom for our listeners about writer’s conferences?

Grace Fox: Absolutely, GO. Have a teachable heart. Know that what you think you’re going for may not be at all what God has in mind. It might be about ministering to somebody in the airport on your way or the person in the plane beside you. God’s purposes are so much bigger than ours, so go with a wide open heart.

Karen Ball: Yes, amen. Thanks for joining us today. You can find previous episodes and more resources at right from the deep.com, and I bet you know someone who needs this podcast will please share it with them.

So until next time, embrace the deep, your writing and your life will never be the same.

Don't stop until God tells you to.
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