Lessons From My Creative Writing Class: Art Imitating Life, Girl Imitating Writer

Week 8 of my online creative writing class begins today and I had a d’oh moment last night when I realized that hey, I could have been blogging about the experience from the get-go. (Yes, I did sort of write about it here, but then…nothing.) I’ve been overcome with this hindsight feeling so many times since this blog began that it’s become sadly familiar. I like to think of it as the v8 Blog Effect–Gee, I could have had a blog topic!

Each week of the class has a different theme and prompt relating to writing, story development, craft. One week focused on story openings and first sentences; another, dialogue. When Week 5 hit, I was not feeling the prompt. I didn’t know what to write about, I didn’t have any ideas for characters or plot, and I made the mistake of reading a few classmates’ stories before I wrote mine. This totally intimidated me because:

a) They had gotten their work done so early that they had posted it before I had even started my story.
Perhaps their brains had more throbbing, intelligent veins than mine. Maybe they are genius schedulers who know how to prioritize and do not get sucked into watching youtube clips for hours. It’s possible that when they write, they don’t wail and pause the plot to type THIS IS SO STUPID or ACTUAL GOOD DESCRIPTION HERE into the Word document.

and

b) Their stories were Good.
Enough said.

Anyway, lost and bewildered but determined to turn something in, I ended up writing a pretty true-to-life scene of an encounter between me and a friend I lost touch with several years ago. This meeting has never actually happened, but I’ve thought about this friend a lot during space-outs and daydreams and had already imagined what it would be like if we ran into each other. Basically, the narrator of the story was me, and the friend she runs into was this friend from my past. Oh, I gave the narrator a few twists so that she wasn’t an exact duplicate of me–but the way she talked, the thoughts that floated through her head, her sense of humor–they were all mine.  

I was perusing Ryan Gosling’s imdb page recently (I had just seen Crazy, Stupid, Love and had heard angels singing when he took his shirt off –so of course I had to be a creeper and look him up. See? This is how I get off the writing track.) There’s a quote from him–and it’s on the internet, so it must be accurate–where he talks about the characters he plays and how they relate to him. 

All my characters are me. I’m not a good enough actor to become a character. I hear about actors who become the role and I think ‘I wonder what that feels like’. Because for me, they’re all me. I relate to these characters because aspects of their personality are like me. And I just turn up the parts of myself that are them and turn down the parts that aren’t. 

This is how I feel about the characters I make up–thus, I’m pretty sure it’s a sign that Ryan Gosling would find me fascinating and familiar and probably witty and beautiful. Every perspective I write from, every character I try and create, has to have a little bit of me in them or else it’s like I’m swimming against a really strong current. (And I’m not a very good swimmer.) 

That said, this Week 5 story character was so me–even with the little details I gave her that had nothing to do with my life–that I was basically writing a fantasy staring myself. And when I posted my words to the class board, I failed to consider what it would be like to read my classmates’ and teacher’s comments about a character that was me.

“You capture the subtle boredom and desperation and confusion in the narrator’s life nicely,” one person said. And I thought Huh, I guess I am subtly bored and desperate and confused…sometimes not so subtly.

The teacher was particularly  interested in the narrator’s voice and sensibility. “She has a super high degree of self–consciousness,” he observed, “which leads her frequently to comment on and critique her own behavior. Lively, self–deprecating, ironic, rueful—the voice is at times all of these things, and it’s hard not to feel some warm feeling toward her.” Well, I’m glad somebody feels some warmth towards me. But aw man–am I basically characterized by a high degree of self consciousness? I wonder if everybody finds me insecure. Do they? DO THEY?

Another person suggested that I further establish the “unreliability” of the narrator. “I’m not getting enough subtext between the narrator and [the other character],” she said. She advised that I go ahead and acknowledge that the narrator’s memories of the friendship are significantly flawed and full of regret and doubt. Woah, this is getting weird.

It was a little surreal to read other people’s reactions to and interpretations of my personality and insecurities. It was like anonymous therapy with well-read therapists who majored in English. I read through all the comments on this story that could have been my life and I sat at my desk thinking about protagonists and writers, and art imitating life and life imitating art. I mean, wouldn’t it be weird/neat/interesting, if someone wrote an unfiltered “me” character and submitted it to a class just to see what other people thought about the hot mess of strengths and weaknesses that that person lived with every day? And actually, wouldn’t that make a great story? (DIBS!!! I CALLED IT! YOU HEARD IT!) It would be a little like the film Adaptation and a little like the recent A Midnight in Paris–one of the best movies I’ve seen lately, even if it didn’t include a shot of Ryan Gosling’s abs. But it also would be completely different. Get it?

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of the wheels in my head spinning.

If I had to define the lesson I got from Week 5 of this creative writing class, I’d say it was something about characters as reflections of authors/real people. What? I didn’t say I would define it well. Okay, I guess there’s also a lesson in there about the evolution of plot ideas. There, are you happy? Two (vague) lessons. 

If any of you are working on writing projects of your own, I hope (but don’t expect) this was helpful. Really, good luck. If you’re like me, you’ll need it.

I’ll Take My Criticism Sandwich With Extra Cheese, Hold The Pickles

So, the online Creative Writing course I signed up for right before the apocalypse-that-wasn’t started last week. It’s an interesting experience, taking an online class. Though there is a system and certain expectations, I can log in as my schedule allows and post when I have time. The other students are eager and enthusiastic and, in general, a good deal older. That last distinguishing fact means that they seem to have a a good grasp of their abilities, goals, confidence. And they write!

We are reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird as a class–no hardship, since this is one of my favorite books and never fails to be inspiring and reassuring. One of the most re-readable parts is about the writer and self-doubt:

Typically you’ll try to comfort yourself by thinking about the day’s work–the day’s excrementitious work. You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer.

and later…

Many of [my students] have been told over the years that they are quite good, and they want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout–the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia.

The class’s first writing assignment was due today and of course, I decided at midnight to completely rework the story I had mostly finished. Part of what makes midnight the witching hour is that at that time, horrible, deformed, delusional ideas seem like good ones. Your common sense is infiltrated by insidious what-ifs that have all the charm of a used car salesman and the diabolical temptation of a second cookie. When I had a roommate, I could occasionally be talked out of creatively suicidal actions like last-minute writing makeovers. Left to my own devices and stuck in my own brain bog, I become tangled in good intentions and panic.

It doesn’t help that I’ve had one successful eleventh hour idea. The night before my senior thesis presentation, the world aligned, the matrix grid decoded itself, and I saw a way to organize my speech to be more thoughtful, clear, and engaging.  It was a crazy plan–why not just go with the perfectly fine version I had prepared? But no, never! Perfection flirted with me (the saucy minx) and I had to pursue it.

The final copy of my speech was better. Was it worth the agony? Yes. Well, probably. But the horrible puce lining was that after this one success story, late night ideas are harder to suppress. It’s like when someone fixes a couple up and it happens that the two click and make a nice go of it. It could have been a fluke or a lucky guess, but it doesn’t matter–now, that matchmaker will try pairing people off like a busybody Noah.

So I started over last night, trying to approach my idea from a different angle. (The first draft was round, and I wanted it sharp, if you know what I mean.) Then, I decided that some of the sentences or paragraphs from my first draft should be kept so I started copy-pasting. Then, I got confused about which version had which background. Had I copy-pasted a section on eating without ever mentioning that the characters were having dinner? Was a character talking, having a big dialogue-y moment, who was never introduced or explained? Had I cut out the scene that had been my inspiration in the first place?? Hysteria bubbled up around 1 am, my brain started twitching soon after. 

I ended up wrestling my short story into something resembling a short story and turning it in (posting it) this morning. I wasn’t at all satisfied with it, and not just in the I’m-never-satisfied-with-my-writing sort of way. I knew I had botched up my naive attempt to make my draft better but I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to turn it in before I went crazy (okay, crazier). So I closed my eyes and clicked “post,” and then ran away from the computer.

Then, the responses started coming in. Well, okay, one response. Critiques are an essential part of the class and for that matter, a vital part of the writing process. That said, when I read my classmate’s comments I was like a raw collection of nerve endings, the Phantom of the Opera’s less stable sister, a woe-is-me maiden from the olden days–all rolled into one. “I know,” I thought. “It’s terrible. It’s not my best work. Yes, you’re right, it doesn’t flow. No, that part doesn’t make sense to me either. Yes. Yes. Of course. Yes. Stop! Stop reading! Don’t look at it! Avert your eyes! Save yourself!”

“The good news,” Anne Lamott says, “is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. […] And often the right words do come, and you–well–‘write’ for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper. But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are.”

The good news is that I completed my first assignment and received straightforward, constructive criticism. The bad news is that I sort of miss the elementary school days of gold stars and compliment sandwiches, and I’m still learning not to mutilate my first drafts.

Friends Dragging Friends and Absent Words

Even in 2-D, running sucks

Bad Abigail! More than a week without posting? Bad! And what were you doing that whole time? Well? What was that? That’s what I thought–nothing! 

In high school P.E, the teacher used to make us run around the gym for a certain amount of time. (In my mind, it was long, painful hours–who knows how long it was in reality?) Those who stopped, failed. If I recall correctly, the teacher’s rule was that you had to have one foot in the air at all times. Sometimes, to amuse myself while running in circles, I would play with my feet placement. Up, down, up, down, airborne, on the ground. I probably resembled a drunk gazelle, only less graceful. 

Our teacher’s pièce de résistance, however, was that she would idly pick off runners and make them pull over to the side (these teacher-approved stops didn’t count as stopping) while she put two fingers to their neck and counted their pulse rate. If it was high enough, she sent them on their way, back to the running masses. If it was too low–fail. 

I was always picked out for a pulse count. Maybe it looked like I wasn’t running to my full potential (which I probably wasn’t) or the teacher had a particular place in her heart-region that was reserved for me, but there was never a time that I wasn’t obliged to halt my unremarkable-but-still-mobile progress. The uncomfortable wait, with the teacher’s fingers on my neck, usually felt longer than it really was. I never failed the pulse rate test, but it was agonizing all the same. It wasn’t the embarrassment of  being singled out, or the possibility of failing P.E (that was, after all, always a possibility for me). It was that after my heart succeeded in beating the proper number of times, my P.E teacher would tell me to get going again. “Okay, you’re good. Now, get running again and keep running until I say otherwise.”

Now, I may have passed high school physics by the skin of my teeth (and the grace of a teacher who recognized that matter didn’t really matter to me), but I know that a body at rest abso-freaking-lutely wants to stay at rest. To start running again, after being stopped for more than a heartbeat of time? Agh. Commence groaning.

Luckily, my friend Nikki was in my class. She was rarely stopped during these runs, but when she was, her heart rate impressed our teacher–something about the speed with which it dropped. While I stood with the teacher’s fingers on my neck, Nikki enthusiastically kept the faith, running in circles without slowing down. When my count was finished, and the idea of getting one foot in the air again was more than a little daunting, Nikki would actually take a hold of my arm and pull me into motion. You know that Albert Camus friendship quote that goes: “Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” Nikki makes me think of that, only our quote would go something like “Don’t run away from me; I definitely won’t follow. Don’t run without me; I won’t be inspired. Just take my arm and pull without mercy while I struggle behind you…and be my friend.”

I posted more than a week ago and intended to do so again a few days later. A few days later, I claimed to be uninspired and vowed to write the next day. I met a friend for coffee on Monday and Oh My Words! came up in our conversation. I really should post something when I get home, I thought. I had time to watch itty bitty rappers on slightly trashy tv, I had time to see amazing garments made out of paper, and I had time to ponder phobias, dogs, and true callings. But I did not blog. Once you’ve stopped and taken an unintentional blogging break, it’s hard to start again. My words have been absent from the internet universe for all this time because it’s hard to take a hold of your own arm and drag yourself until something good results. 

Except that I sat down to write a quick word about writing, procrastination, and my leave of absence, and now have 700+ words that form a story that form a blog post that breaks my blogging silence. So I guess I can yank myself into action.

I almost wish there was someone around to time my heart rate.

aorta be a law against running

How It Feels to Catch a Rubber Chicken in Your Mouth

This is how I felt after discovering that my post Fun With Allergies! had been Freshly Pressed last Friday. I was going to try and describe it with words, but after trying for half an hour and not getting beyond it feels freakin’ great! I decided that a picture says a thousand words. See how this dog caught that rubber chicken? The triumph! The unparalleled joy! That chicken is a prize and it will be treasured!

Okay, in all seriousness, being Freshly Pressed last week was a really great writing-affirming experience. It was the second time my words have been featured on the WordPress homepage and I was no less thrilled or grateful. Like the last time, this Freshly Pressed post was a light, just-for-fun kind of thing. But to have someone (lots of someones!) identify with it and find the funny? That means a lot. 

As you may know, this came on the heels of a job letdown. I’ve been feeling a little lost. But if I can’t control the rest of the universe, at least I have power and the chance for ultimate expression in my own little blogging world. Here, apparently, I can be funny and my words can be touching. Here, my words have a life outside of my own head. (It’s good for them to socialize.)

Anyway, thanks for reading, subscribing, and commenting. (Speaking of comments–in the beginning, I wanted to respond to all of them. As more and more piled up, it became harder. Just so you know, I do read and appreciate every one….) I hope you’ll continue to read and comment and enjoy. 

Now, I’m off to toss toys at my dogs and see if any of them catches one and feels Freshly Pressed. 

I Shall Never Delete Again

Don't do it! You have so much to live for!

During my last semester at college, I took a Narrative Journalism class taught by a Real Journalist.  I heard that school officials considered it a real coup to get him to teach–and it was. He was a Pulitzer prize winner whose byline had appeared in the kind of publications that people read proudly in Starbucks, spread out on their coffee tables when company comes over, and cite in arguments they want to win. He was knowledgeable, intent on really teaching his students, and a damn good writer.

He scared the bejeezus out of me.

He looked like an older Mr. Clean or a younger Mr. Magoo, but he oozed toughness and had a zero-tolerance, no-nonsense attitude…when he was happy. On the first day of class, there were at least thirty students eagerly awaiting the prof’s arrival. When he did finally appear,  he froze in the doorway and raised his eyebrows. “There’s a lot of you this semester!” We all looked around and sort of chuckled, because that’s what you do when a teacher makes an unfunny comment. He put his briefcase on the podium and his hands on his hips. “Well, no matter. I expect at least half of you will be gone by next class. Nothing personal, you just won’t make it because either you or your writing won’t hold up.” Interestingly enough, he was right. By the second class, our numbers had significantly dwindled.

He was really into calling on people out of the blue. I thought of it like guerilla teaching because he would psych the class out, pretend he was focused on the board or a book or another topic, then suddenly bark “You! Michael! Your lede! Now!” Some students, I think, got a big kick out of the criticism. “Snore! Boring! You have to make sure the reader gets beyond the first sentence! Your third sentence is decent–why did you hide it? You’ve got to use your brain a little more–think about it!”

I had a merciless love-hate relationship with this course. I recognized the value of the learning experience, but when it was time for class I would cling to the ceiling like a terrified cat and my roommate would have to approach cautiously and coax me down in a gentle voice. “It’ll be okay…You can do this…Pretty girl…Good girl…” It was a three-hour class (7-10 p.m.) and sometimes during our mid-class break I would see other students grabbing a late-evening snack or hanging around the quad and I’d dream about making a break for it. I had a big soul-searching experience though, and decided that my fight or flight instincts were heavily skewed and mightily screwed up. (Fight or flight? Which way is the door?) So, even though the class and the teacher made me cower and sweat (on the inside and outside, respectively), I stayed. I stuck it out.

My final assignment of the semester was a profile on the author Michelle Huneven–whose work is fabulously haunting, by the way. When I got one of my many drafts back the professor’s comments were inserted directly into the piece and written in all caps. It gave the impression that he was interrupting my paper to yell his thoughts. 

Huneven is the author of three novels which GO ON A “WHICH” HUNT! KILL THE WHICH! IT DRAGS YOUR WRITING DOWN DOWN DOWN! have individually and collectively earned critical praise and success.

He definitely had some problems with my profile, but in between the critique, if you looked carefully, were little nuggets of praise. It’s not like he gushed or anything, but that was the point. He wasn’t a gusher; you earned his compliments or you didn’t. That’s why those nuggets–extra crispy, the way approval should be–meant the world to me. 

Recently, I deleted  these comments. It was an accident–a horrible, tragic accident. To make a long story short (and this has gotten to be a long story) I had a whole bunch of windows open on my computer screen and didn’t realize which one I was working in. Stupidly, I deleted his comments and when Word asked if I wanted to save all changes, I clicked yes.

At first I thought I could ask some techy person (gods, in my opinion) and they could magically find what I had foolishly lost. But what’s saved is saved. When I truly realized what I had done, I unraveled. I’ll admit, I even cried. I’d been storing those comments like nuts for the winter. I’d been treasuring them like a mystical golden ring. (“My precious!”) My mom happened to call during this little crisis and, after decoding the situation from my frustrated ranting, asked if I still had the article itself. Well, yes. I still had the profile I had written on Huneven, just not the critique by my professor. “But you have the article!” My mom said. As far as she was concerned, that was what was important.

I’ve tried to find comfort in the fact that my words weren’t lost. Shouldn’t I care more about my work than this response to it? Who cares if I can’t quote exactly what those comments said, as long as I remember how I felt reading them. That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is that I’m still mourning the loss of those comments. I think we all keep little reminders of success and struggle. It’s an ego thing. It’s a confidence thing. It’s a human thing.

Before you ask, my computer now automatically makes backups and saves originals, so hopefully that will counteract my technological foolishness. You know one of the most frustrating things about this experience? When I told people what happened, they would say things like “You didn’t back it up?” or “That’s why you should always have a copy elsewhere.” Let me tell you, as legitimate and natural as those reactions may be, they’re just not particularly helpful or comforting. I might have to teach an etiquette course so people know how to properly deal with computer document bereavement. For me, there was a lot of chocolate involved, which (WHICH!) I should probably devote a whole class to….