Live Bodies at Killer Nashville

This year’s ironic Killer Nashville logo.

As with all other life on the planet involving humans, writers conferences went on hiatus -- or Zoom -- in 2020 following the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By mid-2021, the prevalence of vaccines, combined with people's ability to adapt to masking, social-distancing and other behavior adaptations (don't start coughing in a roomful of people and expect to stay there) turned U.S. culture back in the direction of normal.

And so Killer Nashville returned last week.

In the coming days, I'll put together some thoughts and insights into the highlights that I experienced. The hope is that someone who wasn't able to get to Franklin, Tenn., for Killer Nashville can still learn from afar.

For now, the overriding emotions are gratitude and enlightenment. It would have been understandable had Killer Nashville Founder Clay Stafford shelved the conference for the second year in a row.

Accepting In-Person Health Risks

(In his welcome address, he acknowledged to attendees that he was the last holdout to cancel a conference in 2020, waiting until less than a month before start-time to pull the plug from last August's scheduled event. He also admitted that the emergence and rise of the COVID-19 Delta variant, which is proving to be particularly contagious, especially among unvaccinated individuals, delivered many sleepless nights before opting to press forward with the 2021 conference.)

Everyone in the room understood the bargain. We'd all paid to be there. We sat together in a large ballroom multiple times for larger gatherings and lunches.

We broke off into smaller rooms of various sizes, where (mostly unmasked) speakers and panels of speakers delivered their wisdom. Some in the audience wore masks. Others did not.

We respected distancing and mostly declined handshakes, preferring fist bumps, elbow taps and head nods for, "Hi, great to meet you."

The demographic was the usual for a crime-writers gathering: Most over 50, more women than men, overwhelmingly white.

But we were there. We were live. In person.

Introvert Writers Brave the Crowd

We'd all made the decision to accept whatever health risks there were to be there, and we had to admit one undeniable fact: It was good to meet in person. Check that: It was great to meet in person.

It was wonderful to hear live laughter, groans and in-room commentary. It was nice to take notes on paper, with no computer screen in front, and to see others doing the same.

A joke I heard years ago: What do you call a roomful of introverts praying that no one asks them a question or asks them to speak? A writers conference.

Not every writer on earth, of course, is an introvert. Just most of them.

As a group, we prefer solitude to crowds, quiet to noise, reading and writing to Netflix and social gatherings.

This was true at Killer Nashville. During the multi-day event, many of us sat at round eight-top tables for 40-minute sessions. Sometimes we introduced ourselves, sometimes not. (I'll note that the eight-tops NEVER had the full eight people. We all spread out, and most tables had two to four people, an a few popular sessions had six.)

The point: Our comfort zone is to wander from session to session, sitting where we want, asking questions if we want or just listening if we prefer.

We Need Writers Conferences

As with almost all events in 2020, most writers conferences were cancelled. That was especially true for those that were scheduled for the first half of the year during the initial stages of the pandemic when everything was so scary. (Remember when we were afraid to touch a table top after someone else just had?)

A few events went directly to Zoom. I can't think of a single conference that went on as scheduled last year.

Speaking for myself, we writers need these events. Even though we'd much rather spend time writing than sitting at a big ballroom table eating lunch with a bunch of (mostly) strangers, we need to get out.

That's what sparks ideas. That's what stirs the soul.

I once attended a week-long conference for newspaper editors, and a good piece of advice was doled out at the end of it. "When you go home and go back to work, be humble. You are excited by all the ideas you learned here, but don't take all that energy and excitement to work with you for a while. Remember that your co-workers didn't get the chance to come here, and they're as worn down as you were when you arrived."

Luckily, writing is a mostly solo endeavor. But bottling up the excitement and making it last longer, that's an idea I can get behind.

Killer Nashville Unmasked

It should be noted that not every mystery writer's conference took the approach that Killer Nashville did. Bouchercon, an annual writer-and-reader event of national renown, opted to cancel its 2021 event in New Orleans with the promise of returning to NOLA in 2025. This year's Bouchercon was to start tomorrow.

Killer Nashville opted to soldier on with guests of honor Walter Mosley, Lisa Black and J.T. Ellison. (Black and Ellison were on site. Mosley's two sessions were conducted via Zoom, with Stafford serving as host.)

It wasn't that long ago that the idea of a mostly mask-less conference was acceptable. Then Delta reared its head earlier this summer. Stafford didn't offer it up, but talking to other writers, some of their friends had opted not to attend the event out of health concerns.

The theme of this year's event, then, carried a dose of irony: Killer Nashville Unmasked.

We weren't there yet, but the title fis as a double entendre. As mystery novelists, we all unmask characters all the time.

Everyone's on a Journey

There's also a third unmasking that takes place at these kinds of gatherings. When you first make a commitment to attend a conference like Killer Nashville -- and there are several around the country -- you arrive with a large sense of inferiority. Your inner voice is telling you: "Do I really belong here?" "All these other authors are so famous. Will they even acknowledge me?" "Who can I talk to?"

What you discover is that no matter where you are on your writing journey, others in the room (in every room!) are right there with you, or else they were there not long ago.

You learn that their first drafts suck, too. And that writing a novel is most certainly not about producing the perfect first draft, it's about producing the perfect last draft while mastering the craft in between Draft 1 and Completed Manuscript.

That the phrase "novel writing" is less accurate than "novel rewriting."

That some authors whose books you see at airports once were rejected by multiple agents and publishing houses and sometimes did not have their contracts renewed. Why? Because once upon a time, they had to learn the craft, too.

All those lessons came back at Killer Nashville. It was wonderful to experience them live.