T + P4 = B

Six years ago, I scribbled the above formula into a notebook while listening to bestselling author Laurie Beth Jones keynote at the 31st annual American Society of Journalists and Authors conference.

I thought about that today, not the formula as I had to look it up in my notes but the general essence of that conference, as I hobnobbed with some 40 authors, playwrights, and poets in town for the 4th annual Newburyport Literary Festival. Throughout the day, I sat in on several panels involving children's writing, graphic novel illustration, and poetry.

Which brings me to travel...

Seven months before hearing Jones speak, I had returned home to Massachusetts after a consulting job in California went sour that resulted in a cross-country roadtrip.

Driving over 20,000 miles across 20+ states and half of Canada, I visited the sun-drenched beaches of San Diego and Halifax, the natural wonders of Yellowstone and Acadia, and the urban centers of Winnipeg, Toronto, and Denver. My so-called "Great American Roadtrip" later became a series of workshops at the Boston Center for Adult Education and provided the backdrop for numerous travel essays that continue to this day.

After returning from California, I attended numerous literary conferences in Boston and New York between 2002-04 through illustrious organizations such as ASJA, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the South Asian Journalists Association (the latter I previously wrote about here).

Perusing through my saved journals from the j- conferences, I see copious notes on writing tips and tricks, finding one's voice, advantages of not having j-school experience and dozens of other media topics from the likes of Barbara Ehrenreich, Ken Burns, Susan Orlean, Roy Peter Clark, Adam Hochschild, Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Obbie, Adrian LeBlanc, and Victor Merina... not to mention those who have passed on such as David Halberstam, Molly Ivins, and Peter Jennings.

Fast forward to the present, and the first panel I attended, So You Want to Be a Famous Writer, featured authors Terry Farish, Lauren Weinstein, and Natasha Friend.

I listened to an elderly woman ask the women how to discipline oneself to write a novel without distraction from daily vices. Weinstein talked about the importance of pets and Friend spoke of keeping to a calendar, and through it all I chuckled to myself because God knows how many times in how many conferences and how many panels I've heard that same question.

Everyone wants to be a writer, and God bless every one of them. But how many wannabe writers successfully transition from concept to creation?

People, said Jones at the 2002 ASJA conference, are whiners, dreamers, and doers. Whiners complain about what is, dreamers wonder about what could be, but doers encapsulate the raw material of what is and what could be to define a vision and bring it into the now.

Jones formularized writing as T + P4 = B, where T is Talent; P is Passion, Pain, Persistence, and Promotion; and B is Bliss.

Do you agree with this formula?