I decided a few years ago that I needed to take my career more seriously. I knew how to write sentences, and sort of knew how to write stories. What I was missing, I decided, was open mic nights. I know a lot of musicians and I talk to comedians, and a lot of their stories of success involve open mic nights early in their careers. After hearing a few of these stories, I figured out what an open mic night is for them: manufactured luck.
Luck: when preparation crashes into opportunity. That’s how I figure it. When folks talk about writing, they talk about luck. They talk about the odds being against you, and that writers need a lucky break to make it. I suppose that’s true, from a certain point of view. In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck. All those moments posing as lucky or unlucky are opportunities, and either your preparation was in order, or it wasn’t. That part’s up to you.
Some opportunities will come at you wild, hit you cross-eyed and leave you winded. You can’t plan for those, but you can be prepared for them.
Events like writers conferences are manufactured opportunities. A writers conference creates an environment with a saturation of opportunities far higher than average.
And they come with tools for increasing your preparation for the opportunities too. So that’s a perk.
Opportunity
The opportunity you need may not be the same one everyone else needs. The key, then, is leaving yourself open to opportunities when they come along.
This will be true for all writers conferences, but I’ve got to talk for a second about some particulars of the next Colorado Gold Writers Conference. ’Tis the season.
As with all of our conferences, this one has about a hundred and twenty hours of educational programming taught by about fifty or sixty presenters.
The expertise of these presenters ranges from cartography to litigation to acting.
That doesn’t even touch on the dozens of presenters with hundreds of years of collective experience in the publishing industry.
These people will be wandering around the conference, with their expertise, most of them excited to have a conversation with you.
That’s only a small portion of the people there, though.
Circle of Your Peers
There’s a piece of statistical analysis that takes the population of the world and talks about how few of them are writers, and then how few of them will finish a book. That creates a small subset of the whole population. It’s a small percentage. Like less than one percent or something.
Of that percentage, there’s an even smaller subset of people who make a decision to take their career seriously enough to invest in it. Simply by the fact of taking the time and energy and spending the resources to go to a writers conference, these people have at least somewhat signalled a further level of taking their writing seriously.
That signalling usually accompanies a variety of other truths about their lives. These are your peers: the people who have decided that writing a book is worth the energy it takes. They understand it, just like you do.
So even though most of them are introverts, you might leave yourself open to meeting people. It might turn out that someone—some several—everyone at the conference turns into the circle of peers who give you the roots, the support, the encouragement, the rivalries, that will push your career.
That’s not so bad.
The Power of Prose
The theme for Colorado Gold Writers Conference 2025 is The Power of Prose. We’re celebrating the superpower of writing. Quite a few of our presenters are getting into that theme. Look for workshops with phrases in their titles like “Unleashing Your Superpower” and “Your Secret Identity”. It’s pretty fun to see people getting into the spirit of it.
Our keynote speakers represent a satisfying juxtaposition.
Jonathan Maberry, an experienced and long-time friend of the conference, is back again to talk to us about world-building and the world of publishing.
C.J. Leede is in the early stages of what’s looking like an exciting career in speaking into the cool world of thematically-driven alt-horror, and we’re lucky to get her.
We’re bringing in more agents than usual, covering a breadth of interests and backgrounds. You can read all about them on the conference main page.
And, as usual, the real draw is the community.
Manufactured Luck
Those musicians and comedians go to open mic nights because that is one tool available to them whereby they can align their preparation with a higher saturation of opportunity than they might get otherwise.
Writers have different tools for manufacturing luck.
Part one is preparation. Write a lot and read a lot. That’s your preparation.
Part two is opportunity. Find ways to be involved in the communities that open doors.
Writers conferences are among those tools. And ours is a pretty good one.
Good luck! Have any questions? Send them our way!