The Secret
Portal at ACFW—Lenora Worth
A lot of writers, editors, agents and industry people congregated at the Omni Hotel and Resort in downtown Nashville last week for the annual American Christian Fiction Writers conference. It was great to see so many friends and get such wonderful hugs, but our MC Brandilyn Collins warned us about the “normals” out there. We needed to remember they might not get some of our conversations.
Writers are
used to “normals.” I call them civilians. They are the non-writers who can’t
understand why we grill people we’ve just met with all sorts of pointed
questions. Especially if one of those people has a profession that we find
fascinating.
So we knew
to behave and try not to discuss interesting plot twists in the elevator or in the bathroom. And we couldn’t get too giddy or scream too very loud if
we got a nice contract on the next book.
I was fine
with all of that. But Brandilyn also mentioned the strange elevators at the
Omni. We had one wing that had floors One through Thirteen. My husband and I
were on the thirteenth floor. Okay, I was also fine with that. But then it got
weird. The other set of elevators went from One to Four and then skipped a few
floors and went on up way too high for me. Brandilyn called it the Alternate
Universe and asked for stories about it. What went on in this strange gap where
the elevator didn’t stop? Was it a secret portal? An empty space? A place of
horrors beyond imagination? I had a story but I was always too tired at night
to sit down and write it.
But I know
what that AU was all about. It’s the Author’s Universe. It’s the land where
Alice goes down the rabbit hole and the Hobbit Frodo finds that ring. It’s
where Romeo meets Juliet and Scarlett first sees Rhett Butler. It’s the place
where happy endings collide with chilling suspense stories.
It’s the
place of alliterations and allegories and action and adventure. It’s the place
where irony meets reality and reality turns into a fantasy. This place is a
place of lost dreams and broken faith, a place of hope and redemption and
restoration and reformation. It’s a place where, as Ted Dekker suggested, we
write to find ourselves. Or we write to lose ourselves. It’s the place where transformation
meets meditation and where “methanoia” (a kind of rendering that Ted also
mentioned) meets method and structure and plot and a transformation takes place
right before our eyes. It’s the place where we do find ourselves in every word we write and we do lose ourselves
in deep point-of-view and hard-to-write plots.
It’s the
place where our imaginations go to find the truth, where our minds go to find
the perfect plot and the perfect pitch. It’s a magical, enlightening,
encouraging, and entertaining place. It’s a world where writers go to learn
craft and tell their tales. It’s a well and it’s a mountain. It’s a train and
it’s a plane. It’s a deep ocean and a sunny meadow.
It is the
stuff of dreams.
Or at
least, that’s how I see it. While we were there, learning and praying and meeting
and greeting and seeing and being seen, our imaginations went straight to that
Alternate Universe and made it our Authors’ Universe.
And I loved
every minute of it. If you were there, what do you think about the AU? Did you
fall down the rabbit hole or find that all-important ring? Or did you go all
sci-fi and get beamed up? I hope that you found something great at ACFW. And I
hope you came away with your imagination intact and your heart ready for all of
the possibilities!
Here are a
few more pictures from my adventures!
And look for what my imagination created, out in October:
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