9/21/10

Had my fiction workshop yesterday and we had our first full round of 4 stories.  I am beginning to understand what a workshop at the graduate level is all about, versus one at the undergrad level.  These students have more experience writing, plus they are more intelligent overall than the undergrads.  In the undergrad class I took last semester I had the upper hand in that the papers were easy to critique and the students were mostly pretty dumb.  For the graduate class, we are all obviously here because we love to write, so it's a whole different ball game.  The stories are more complex, yet there are still lots of problems.  More problems than I thought!  The hard part is finding out how best to approach critiqueing them.   Many of them already have novels started and so they are submitting 2 or so chapters from their "novels" for workshopping.  In my opinion, they should workshop the IDEAS for novels themselves, because some of these ideas are pretty lame.  I have not been impressed so far, with any of the work I've read.  That's not to say mine will be better - it just shows how hard this damn writing business is, no matter what the age or level.  There are a few "older" - much older students in the class, and one who is particularly 'verbose', and there are many of us, so it's a little tedious with all these egos in the room.  Everybody wants to talk, most of us have something to say.  I am feeling a little bummed about the whole experience right now.  I stayed home from work today with a sore throat and an achy neck and head.  I think the push I did on the weekend was too much  The house is dirty and it's making me feel anxious. Laundry is out of control; makes me feel anxious too.

I am happy about my journaling, though.  I am using Theresa's idea of keeping a private blog as a journal to record my experience with the program and I like it because I can just put everything down, including private, whiny thoughts I wouldn't put here.  It's easier than the hand-written journal I've been keeping for over a year now.  I can get my thoughts out faster.  Still, there is something to be said for hand-writing your thoughts.  The whole hand-to-paper dynamic is something important and shouldn't be lost.  In Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way" she stresses the importance of keeping the Morning Pages, 3 hand-written pages of pure automatic writing in order to purge all the petty things that nag at us before we start our day.  I've been doing it for over a year now, and love it, but without doing the exercises from the book in conjunction with the journaling, I'm not finding it as magical as I used to.

Today is a lovely, overcast, drizzly, cold day.  It is the perfect kind of day for writing.  If only we weren't out of coffee.  This morning would be perfect, then.