This Post is Sheer Indulgence on My Part

I knew I was going to be a writer ever since I was a kid.  I’ve been reading since I was two, and for the bulk of my childhood, books were the best friends I had, mostly because I was too pathetic to actually talk to anybody face-to-face.  Because I read so much, naturally I was going to write.

And I wrote… a lot of book titles.  I was great at the book titles.  Holy crap, I probably came up with more than a hundred and one of these days, I knew there was going to be a story for each and every one of them.

There weren’t.  There wasn’t even a sentence for one of them.  And that worked out because there’s no way a nine-year-old was going to write the great American novel.  Especially not this nine-year-old.

I wrote a lot of poetry through junior high and occasionally some in high school, but I was getting progressively worse, so I just stopped for a while and the only thing I wrote were essays.  There was nothing profound about them; I just did enough to graduate.  I did notice that my writing got faster.  My essays could get written in one hour before they were due and I was still getting A’s consistently.

And to be honest, I don’t understand the good grades.  Halfway through my junior year, I started making a game out of the essays to see how many times I could add a swear word and not get in trouble.  Turns out I never could get in trouble, and by my senior year, my teacher practically encouraged me to keep it up.  It lost its fun.

Because I had gone above and beyond the previous years, my senior year, I only had to take two classes to graduate.  After the morning two hours were up, I was free to do whatever.  I decided to take a couple Creative Writing classes through the college.  The first was an online course that lasted about 12 weeks and was fairly useless.  The only achievement I made was actually finishing my first short story titled:

Okay, I don’t remember the title.  It was so awful that I’ve purged the title from memory.

The next class was actually on campus.  It wasn’t useless.  It was worse than useless; it was downright damaging.

The stories the class submitted were pretty bad, but that part was fine.  Anybody who has started out writing creatively has to accept that they’re on the same level as the kindergartner making macaroni art.  The trouble was the classroom discussion.  Nobody was fooled for a minute that we were spectacular, but the “critiques” were an hour long compliment session.  And the teacher was the worst offender.  You’d think that her job would be to tell us what we were doing wrong and why, and how we could improve our work in the future.  Fat chance.

Early on, I chose to speak to one of the class’s best writers during our group discussion.  She had a gift for imagery, and unlike the rest of the class’s stories, I was never confused for a minute about what was happening.  There was one sentence that bugged me in the story, though, and while it was a nitpick, as soon as I mentioned it, the room got deathly quiet and from the stares I received, I felt like I had killed a puppy in front of them.  After fifteen seconds, the teacher went on to tell me why I was wrong (this was supposedly free discussion) and I never cared to open my mouth for the rest of class.

As the semester progressed, the class continued to get worse.  The published stories we read were pretty awful and the lectures the teacher gave were worse.  When they weren’t boring, they were painfully stupid.  The “F-Word Lecture” was 20 minutes of why the f-word was a good word and the type of effects and emotions you could convey in your writing.

Now, I don’t believe that there are “good” and “bad” words.  Profanity, to me, is all about abuse. Any word has an appropriate use, but some words have been used to abuse people or ideas so often over time that using them tends to cause pain, anger, or fear in a society.  While I’m not scared to say any word I want, I find it considerate and polite to refrain.

Besides, 20 minutes on one word is excessive, especially since this was college.  I couldn’t name any one of them that had problems with the f-word to begin with, so why were we talking about that instead of something valuable? like setting? or plot? or imagery?  I would have settled for an explanation of James Joyce at that point.

The poetry portion of the class was the worst.  We were taught about meter and rhyme, and then told not to worry about it because modern poetry had grown past such quaint styles.  Never mind that meter and rhyme is what helps make poetry musical, memorable, and great.

My second to last class of the semester, we ended up watching a documentary on poetry and poets.  At the end of the film, we listened to a verse about a man digging his crotch into his wife’s butt, and I had to conclude that this class had been a huge waste of my time.

Disappointed but still persistent, I kept taking English classes that got better (it wasn’t hard; the bar was pretty low) and during my last year, my Children’s Literature class easily became the best thing I ever did in school.

But there was little help in writing there.  Any ability I have came because of my discovering the Hatrack Writer’s Workshop.  On Orson Scott Card’s website, www.hatrack.com, the Writer’s Workshop is a place for beginners to discuss writing and offer their own stuff for critiques.

Because of the need to keep publishing rights, you are only allowed to submit the first 13 lines of your manuscript in the workshop.  The other writers will critique your first 13 and if they’re good enough, they’ll ask you to send them the full story.

The discussions were great and illuminating, but the critiques were what it was all about.  The first story I offered was one that I had written in the damaging Creative Writing class.  It was a quaint murder mystery with a sociopathic protagonist.  I knew it wasn’t good but I certainly thought it was worth a read.  Over half a dozen responders told me I was wrong.  My first 13 lines were ripped to shreds and nobody was interested in reading more.

Bruised but excited, I spent several weeks after that studying everybody else’s 13 lines and the responses each got.  I started to get a feel for why some beginnings worked and others didn’t.  The books I read afterwards, I paid great attention to what each author was doing, how it affected, and why they made me want to read onto the next page.

I tried again, this time with a horror about a boy who gets stuck playing a basketball game with a demon.  I posted it on Hatrack and my first 13 lines were perfect.  Not only did I get readers for the rest of the story, I got it from the two writers I respected most in the Hatrack workshop.

I got the story back in two days to find out that everything after the first 13 sucked.  One of them didn’t even get to the end before he sent it back.  It’s a bitter day when you find out you’re not as awesome as you think you are.

I thanked both of them, rewrote the story and somehow managed to get one of my readers to give it another go.  It was good enough for him to finish that time, but at the end, it was still “blah.”  I soon after trashed the story and haven’t looked back.

I learned my lesson and began critiquing others’ stories, tried to do at least one a month, and the experience was good.  After a year on Hatrack, I decided it was time that I find a writing group.  Hatrack offered a forum where you could meet other writers also looking to form a writing group.  I barely got in as the fifth member of one group and counted myself lucky.  I didn’t realize how lucky I was until much, much later.

We were going to start by e-mailing stories, but one of our group had a website called The Story Center where we could have our own private forum.  We could post our whole stories there and have many private discussions on writing or anything else under the sun without any outside intrusion.

One of the best things about this group was our focus.  We took a year and the pattern was pick a theme for a month and in that time write a short story under that theme.  The next month, we would take a week on one story for reading and critiques, and we only had one rule: no matter what, we would tell the truth.  If a story was good, we let you know.  If it was bad, we let you know.

The timing was always a little off per month because there were five of us, but we made it work.  Our first theme was to do a fairy tale retelling.  Mine was a new take on Snow White titled “Fourth Season,” where I turned Snow White’s story into a mythology on how winter became a season.  This one is still a favorite among a couple of my family members.

Let me tell you, my group was honest.  One of my stories tanked hard, but I also managed to do some of my best work with them.  Under the post-apocalyptic theme, I wrote “A Walk to Los Angeles,” which still might be the best story I’ve written, if not because of strong plot, certainly because I achieved all the emotions in my readers that I wanted to achieve.

After a year with the Pirates of Literature, as we dubbed ourselves (Pirates of the Caribbean was still pretty new and fresh then) I was the first to leave because of certain life circumstances.  I kept dropping by to let them know I was still alive, although I talked so much I’m sure a couple of them were wondering if I’d just die already.

Overall, I’ve probably written 30 short stories, most of them missing, and none published.  Still, I loved the experience and wouldn’t trade it for anything… except maybe the perfect tuna salad sandwich, but such I don’t believe can be achieved in this lifetime.

I went on a mission for a couple years and the only writing I ever did was in journals and letters home.  When I finally came back from there, I found that a lot of my writing muscles had been lost and it was really difficult to get back on track.  It wasn’t just the storytelling that had faded away; I no longer had the schedule and drive to keep doing it.

I did rejoin the Pirates and that was great.  I loved being able to get back in touch with old friends and meet new ones.  The group itself, though, had sort of moved on.  Nobody was really writing short stories anymore and had gone onto novels and their own lives.  A lot of the focus that we’d had was gone, especially with due dates.  I’ll admit, the thing that worked best for me in that group was knowing that in one month I had to produce or be subject to mockery.

Without due dates and somebody holding me accountable to them, I didn’t put up.

I ended up writing two novels and never finished them, and it was just as well because in review, they were so bad.  Then when I started my court reporting program and working at Barnes & Noble, I had no more energy to make my own fiction.

I thought I would be a little more disappointed in myself, and truth is, I miss the fiction.  In recent weeks, I began some outlining for a third novel attempt, one that is completely foreign to anything I’ve tried my hand at: a romance.  And I’m honestly pretty excited to be working on it.  I’m even nearly done with the first chapter.

Realistically speaking, though, it could be over a year before I complete the first draft because it is not priority one.  A few years back, I never would have believed that writing fiction would not be my top priority.  These days, it’s not even in my Top 5.

Fiction isn’t as important to me anymore, but writing still is.  I know I’m nowhere near the best writer in the world and don’t expect to be, but I love it.  The reason I started doing this blog was not only to keep me writing, but to keep me writing often and about anything under the sun.  I only write about what interests me and I try to say it as clearly and honestly as I can.  And for the five people that actually read it, that’s a good feeling as well.