18th Annual Surrey International Writers' Conference

Attending the SIWC is a wonderful ritual of autumn. Glimpsed through various windows, the blushing maples remind me of conferences past.

In this hall I talked to poet George McWhirter. The light was thus when I heard Jack Whyte's Scottish burr, virtually unchanged by forty years in Canada. Here I discovered the prodigious works of Diana Gabaldon. In this doorway, I met novelist Anne Perry face to face.

For me, the conference began on Thursday morning, in a wonderful master class where Elizabeth Engstrom discussed the architecture of fiction, as well as the normal and predictable moods that accompany the building phases of each novel.

Friday was the official opening. After the welcoming speeches and the keynote speaker, I'm off to a workshop on short story writing.

Every year it's the same. By lunch time on Friday, I feel filled and satisfied: the conference has already given me so much that even if it ended now, it would still have been worth coming.

A lot of the lessons offered by fellow-writers are reminders -- things we have to hear again and again, in different forms and from different people. We know them, but we don't own that knowledge until we put it to use.

After lunch at a large table that includes an agent as well as a writer from my home town, met at a previous conference, I step out of my comfort zone. This is where the real learning takes place.

I know nothing about Robert McCammon. In his workshop, Page 1, he describes how a book's first line must raise compelling questions. We each write a first line and read it out. He listens and talks about how it pulls in the reader, drives the story forward.

Robert's eyes are lit from within. "This is fun," he says, encouraging us to practice writing first lines, just to exercise the imagination. "A lot of this is just a mystery. How do we do this?" He reminds us that each one of us has a unique story to tell.

"You have to believe in your work in a big way," he says. He sees each work in progress as a child that deserves to be born. Nobody else can tell our stories, give life to that metaphorical child.