NaBloPoMo 3: Writing Classes

I may not have done as much work on Son of a Saint as I would have liked over the past year, but I did take a couple of writing classes, and from the work in those classes I have created four short stories that I'm very excited about.

The first class was taken through a local community college, and the other students were, by their own admission, not as serious about writing or getting published as I was. This difference was probably most obvious during the critiques of the stories (as it was a "workshop," meaning that we spent as much time as we could discussing and critiquing each other's work). The other students' critiques were usually filled with positive comments about their favorite parts of each story, and in a couple of cases the critique was largely simply a retelling of the story in the critic's own words. Still, a class like that was useful to me because it made me very productive word-wise, and it also got me out of my own head and thinking, through the critiquing process, of what I liked and what I didn't like in a story ... what worked and what didn't work.

The second class, which I took this past summer, was a much more "serious" class. Again, it was a workshop, but this time it was taken through Northwestern University. It was clear from the first few moments of the class that the teacher was much more learned in teaching writing than the previous teacher. (Which is not in any way to suggest that my first teacher wasn't a good writer; he simply struggled to communicate the basics of good fiction writing.) There was much more reading, and much more discussion of each of those classic short stories we read. And there were more students in the class who were clearly serious about writing. The drawback was that these students were much younger — other than me, they were all between the ages of 16 and 26 — and while some of them were talented writers, they lacked the life experience that this fortysomething father has had. This issue showed itself most clearly in the critiques, where points that had little to do with the core issues in a story would be discussed ad nauseum. Thankfully, the professor's gentle-yet-firm hand kept things in line and kept the classroom discussions moving in a productive direction.

I spent a bit of time early on worrying about what class to take, and whether it would really be worth my time and money. The fact is, at the point I'm at now, any class was going to be valuable. My own level of expectation from my writing was going to keep the quality of the writing high. And it was going to be useful to simply get some kind of — any kind of — reaction to my writing. Not unlike when I was pursuing a singer-songwriter thing and I would unveil a song I was still working on in front of a live audience, just to sense what might have been working for them. I did get valuable feedback on my stories, and in at least one case the feedback radically changed the story's ending.

But in the future, I'm probably going to start to be a little more selective in my class choices. In fact, I'm toying with the idea of an MFA in creative writing, done through Northwestern's "night school" option. Then I'll really start making money with my writing!

Okay. That was a lame joke.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I can start moving in this direction next fall. The only bad news with this, I think, is that if that happens I probably will have to skip NaNoWriMo again. Because one thing I learned from this summer Northwestern class is that it is a LOT of work. Work that I did with a strong sense of gratitude, but work that would definitely keep me from being able to write a 50,000-word novel at the same time.