By Steffanie Costigan

April 17, 2024

Once in a blue moon, the writers and authors emerge from their writing sanctuaries to come together for writing conferences. One of the fun things to do as an author is to meet up with a large community of authors to learn together more strategies and skills for writing.

The theme of this year’s WordBridge conference was “Writing from the heart.” Boy was it not only fun but insightful. There were so many classes to pick from at times it was hard to pick as there were three writing workshops going on at once sometimes. 

Local authors with so much experience, publishers, marketers, voice actors for audiobooks, and so much to take away from writing conferences. They had something called the slush which was so fun. Picture Americas got Talent but in writing; the way it worked was writers handed in one page of their works anonymously. They had someone read it out loud five judges would listen to it and if they found a mistake, they would raise their hand. As soon as three hands went up the reader would stop, and they would give helpful feedback on why they saw a challenge.

It’s also a helpful way to get an idea of what the publishing houses may think of your work when it is submitted, and reasons why they may hold back from pursuing your work. The judges for the slush were very kind and respectful and in the end, just encouraged everyone to keep on writing not to get discouraged.

Honestly, the best way to sharpen your skills as a writer is to put yourself out there get involved within the writing community and come to these writing conferences and you meet a lot of new friends along the way. You come out feeling inspired and refresh ready to take on the world within your passion. 

You also learn new tips you may have not considered before. Anyone looking to publish should go to a writers’ conference before publishing because there are so many helpful tips, I wish I knew before getting published. It was very interesting to hear about how publishing a book was so different in the past vs now. 

Writing conferences also give you the opportunities to link you to resources and people in the industry which is an incredibly valuable thing in the author community. When you first publish you can feel like a small fish in a ginormous sea and writing conferences are the stepping stones to networking your way into a big sea where you can grow into a bigger fish.

The best thing to do as a new author or an aspiring author is to go to a writer’s conference, you can come out with so much more knowledge and connections.