By SFWC20 attendee Richard M. Brock

The San Francisco Writers Conference was a full-circle moment for me.  Eighteen years ago, when I was twenty, I left college (with good marks) and bought a one way train ticket to San Francisco.  I took all the money I had to my name (about one hundred dollars), a sleeping bag, and a notebook, and I set out to be what I always wanted to be: a novelist.  The novels I wanted to write were not in the classroom.  They were out There.

In my view, I had to learn the What first, which would give me plenty of time to also learn the How.  So, I traveled three thousand miles from anyone I knew to live on the streets of San Francisco and LA, and to write about it.

To begin my education as a novelist,  I spent five weeks on the streets.  I slept on the benches and piers right outside the Hyatt Regency, right under my balcony for the last week.  I slept in parks and alleys and in drainage ditches.  I hitchhiked.  I walked.  Alone.  Observing.  Talking to the invisible masses.  Writing furiously.  Conjuring Kerouac, London, and Twain.

It was the first of what has become a life of Getting Out Into It in a very direct and immersive way, with the sole intention of taking what I find and crafting it into stories that will make people think and feel, that will entertain and inspire, and that might help fix some of the realities that lead to human beings dying in the street right below four-hundred-dollar hotel rooms at the Hyatt Regency.