Last night was the second night of my writing class. It’s going okay.
It’s held in this sort of writers’ center in Capitol Hill (and I think that at least half of my jitteriness last week had to do with having to not only drive but also park in Capitol Hill because I am a North Seattle wuss who doesn’t know how to parallel park because the Florida drivers’ license test didn’t require it, okay) where there is a reading room and a café and a teeny tiny black box theater, I think, and many many shelves of absolutely free books. I availed myself freely of those, of course, and made a huge score with something called Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage published in something like 1941, which I absolutely cannot wait to read once I am out from under the crushing weight of my current library holds. It’s very quiet there at seven in the evening on a Tuesday, although you can hear a lot of laughing and groaning from the screenwriting class upstairs. It’s nice.
My class is all women, of course, and I am one of the three youngest people there, I think. There were many more people last week than this time, where we went around the table and talked about the kind of journal we keep and what we want out of the class and so on and so forth. I mentioned that I’ve been writing online for almost four years and there was quite a bit of discussion about that; everyone else went on about how they write both fiction and poetry, and how they’re working on a sci-fi/mystery/romance right now but how they need a jump-start to get creatively motivated again. I seemed to be the only one not in the middle of writing a novel, actually, which was a little daunting, but then I comforted myself with the snotty realization that I probably have more people reading my “work” (because that’s how you have to refer to the stuff you write, as your “work”) than they do, thanks to this silly journal.
I’m sort of fascinated by the teacher, who I guess writes screenplays and stories and poems. She reminds me a lot of an acquaintance I haven’t seen for a while, in her chin and nose and hair, and I have caught myself checking the syllabus a couple of times to make sure she isn’t that woman. I have amused myself by imagining her life; she wears really cool clothes and I wonder if she gets them on sale or if she just saves up or if she has a lucrative day job or what. I really like the tote bag she carries and I imagine her sitting in a lighted patio restaurant, laughing extravagantly and waving a glass of wine around. I haven’t spoken to her outside of class but I’m considering asking her to look at some of the entries on this journal. We’ll see.
Anyway, we did some writing practice last time, which is that thing where you just keep your hand moving for ten minutes and I did that and thought I did a pretty good job, thanks for asking, in setting and describing a little scene that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I read it aloud and people weren’t supposed to comment on whether or not they liked it, but I liked it. I liked that whole class, actually, mostly because I enjoyed the chance to do some actual writing in a writing class.
Yesterday was a little different…we’d read some stuff on keeping a journal and learning to write for homework or whatever, and there was quite a bit of discussion about that, which I found a little hard to take. I don’t know why. No one, including myself, could really articulate what they thought about the readings, and it devolved into, like, tips for evading writer’s block, or something. “Show, don’t tell!” “If you get stuck try writing the scene from a different perspective!” “Make your conclusion into your introduction!” And so on and so forth.
Now, I’m not saying that all that isn’t good advice, because I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not in the middle of writing a novel. It was just sort of weird and cloying somehow, not to mention very disorganized. The class also turned into group therapy of a sort, and my feelings about group therapy is that it’s fine as long as I’m the one running the group. I was really tired and feeling sort of out of it and I said a couple of incoherent and overwrought things (“Maybe the thing about Cheever is that he is his writing”) but I spent most of the time being quiet and wishing I could go out for coffee with the other girls my age and regretting the fact that I was spending the equivalent of two CDs to sit there and feel slightly bored and slightly dumb and more than a little pretentious (“If you live a bifurcated life, then maybe that will result in bifurcated writing”).
The weird thing is that I want to talk about writing, I want to write about writing, and I want to write more and better. I don’t seem to have the same problems as other people in the class with getting inspired and writer’s block and everything, but that’s probably because my “work” is absolutely the most low-pressure work there is. I mean, whatever, I write some stuff down about my really interesting life and it magically appears on the computer and sometimes it’s good and a lot of the time it’s horrible, but whatever, I just kind of do it. The times I’ve felt stymied about writing here have always had to do with confidentiality and privacy reasons, not because I didn’t have anything to say. I don’t think that means I can’t get better at it, though, this “work” I’m doing. Or maybe that it can’t turn into something else, whatever that something else is.
I don’t know that this class, about which I was so nervous, is really helping with that. Does it matter? It’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend an evening, I guess, even if it feels really self-indulgent and even though I sure wouldn’t mind the extra CDs I could have bought instead. I can’t quell the desire to talk and learn more about writing, though, and to find ways to do it more beautifully and meaningfully and expertly. What I’m doing now with this silly four week class doesn’t exactly feel like a mistake, but I know it’s not really what I’m looking for, what I need to be doing.