Dear Betsy, Since January is the season to apply for summer writing workshops, I wonder what you think of them. For someone who is on draft 10 and year 5 of a novel he started during his MFA, is it worth $1,000 to get a manuscript evaluation at Tin House? Or is that nuts? Other than improving the writing, I imagine the workshops are good for networking. So if a fledgling writer is going to blow a few grand on a workshop, which one? Breadloaf or Tin House? Sewanee or Provincetown? Do you shoot for faculty you admire or authors who write the kinds of book you are writing and might help you land an agent? Thanks in advance for the wisdom and insight. Loyal blog reader

This belongs to Betsy Lerner

Dearest Loyal: I’m going to be honest with you. There is only one reason to go to a summer writing workshop and that is to get laid. I’ve been to four or five writing workshops as a student and I never got laid. This was a huge disappointment. Huge. And I’m not even going to talk about the “dance” they hold in the barn at Breadloaf, aka “Bedloaf.” It’s ridiculous. EVERYONE gets laid. There’s even a faculty fuck pad where everyone leaves their own bottle with name tags! Name tags!

I went to my first summer writing workshop at Johns Hopkins. I wanted to get the poet David St. John for a teacher but I didn’t. Good story? However, a met a woman who would become a lifelong friend, my client, and my best reader. Workshops: three thousand dollars. A reader you trust: priceless.

I think workshops can be extremely valuable. That said, I don’t think you can necessarily choose your teacher, and networking opportunities may or may not present themselves. Go because you need a shot in the arm, or some solid feedback, or the feeling of community. Go because you know you’ve been working on that novel for way too long and it’s time to pony up. Go because poets wear ballet flats and novelists play poker, because of conversation overheard, because you might get some writing done, because it might be fun, because a writer you admire is sitting at the next table, and because you might get lucky.

Any feedback from the summer conference world for my loyal reader?

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I want to talk about money. Impossible not to quote Samuel Johnson’s, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”  Friends, I’ve worked with a lot of blockheads. Then there is the new age-y advice to do what you love and the money will follow. If that’s true, then how come no one ever gets paid for eating in front of the tv? Some writers keep their day job and write at dawn. Others forgo regular employment to support their writing, cobbling together a precarious income with no health benefits . It seems to me that whatever you say about money, you must also say something about time.

I doubt I’m alone in saying that getting paid for my two books was the best money I ever made. I would have laminated that first check and put it over the cash register if I had been the proprietor of a diner.

Writing is awesome. Getting paid for writing is ___________________. (fill in the blank)

Do you write for money? If not, what?

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