The original assignment for which I volunteered was an essay about car trips with small children. Taking the family on a five-hour drive to visit some relatives and attend a conference for work, that should be hilarious, right?

I mean, every parent can relate to long hours of "Are we there yet?" and "I'm hungry!" and "Dad, put two hands on the steering wheel!" along with all the attendant complaints about temperature, speed and curvy roads. I'll count the number of questions, keep track of some of my wittier responses and the whole thing will be a laugh riot.

But what do you do when the kids actually, you know, behave, more or less? Sure, they belted each other a couple times, a few things were thrown and the decibel level got out of control for a mile or two, but they were more or less good kids the entire trip.

Who wants to read about that?

I don't go to a lot of conferences, particluarly ones that appear to be populated with people who are miles better at what I do than I am. But when my brother-in-law's Scrabble acumen at a fundraiser for the event resulted in a free pass to the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, well, I'm not above picking up a few tips from the professionals.

And some of these folks were professionals. Geared mostly toward book writing with some magazines and poetry thrown in, there were New York Times bestsellers here, and winners of several awards I've never heard of but that sound pretty impressive.

Editors from major New York publishing houses took the stage, as did agents, whom I imagined were the ones with the biggest bullseyes on their backs, as aspiring attendees looked for someone to shop their masterpieces.

But as I sat through one session after another, a few realities, not all of them encouraging, became evident.

As is probably true with any creative process, there's no right way to write for a living -- you're not going to leave a conference like this knowing the formula for writing a best-seller. Some of the authors who spoke churn out several paperbacks a year. Others take five years to put a book together, then need a couple more years to wind down, then gear up for the next.

Needless to say, coming from a deadline-driven business, I can more easily relate to the former than the latter.

Some disdain writing groups -- "I'd rather show my stuff to readers," one said -- while others rely heavily on their weekly writers' klatsch for support and inspiration.

And there are as many types of writers as there are ways to go about the craft. At the barbecue Saturday night, I sat with a magazine writer, a playwright and an aspiring writer of television screenplays. The former I have some experience with, but the latter two? I wouldn't know where to begin.

And that's all right. I felt better when the screenplay writer talked about trying to get a feature story into his local newspaper, and the struggles he had making up appropriate quotes for his subjects to "say."

Maybe I'm in the right line of work after all.

The biggest thing I learned, though, was just how lucky I am to be in the seat I occupy right now: a job I like, in a place I'm delighted to live, getting steady pay and benefits to do something I enjoy and that comes relatively naturally.

One of the conference "headliners" was Michael Perry, a native of rural northwestern Wisconsin who's written a handful of books about his home region, playing heavily on the enduring sense of place that led him to move back home.

Perry brought a dry sense of humor, a wide vocabulary and a practiced delivery to his talks, in which he repeatedly talked about how much he loves his work.

At the same time, though, he's a realist. Freelance writing for a living, he said, is "slightly less reliable than farming."

Here's a guy with a handful of books in print, all of them well-reviewed, and yet he relies on magazine writing and relentless touring and speaking to make ends meet.

"Low overhead," he said, is a key to making a living this way.

And sales ability doesn't hurt: "I love to write, I want to write every day, but at the end of the day, I have to sell what I write."

Driving home, I wondered how he'd feel about all those hours on the road if he had a pair of 5-year-olds with him.

Reporter John Harrington: ohn.harrington@helenair.com or 447-4080