Just Write

One of the things I love about teaching a writing class is the energy that is created when people talk about writing. You can feel it in the air, and, for me personally, I become energized by the experience. This has been the case this week, as I have been running the Cole Summer Writers Institute, and have had the opportunity to work with some very creative young people. And the one thing I've noticed is that these kids, despite having to deal with the typical adolescent type traumas, just like to write! They come in on time, some even early, and start writing. During break time they grab ass a bit, but are soon back at the writing. No egos in the way, no posturing, just writing (and some doodling, too, but who doesn't?).

Which is a lot different from the experiences I have had with adult writing groups. Whether it was in a living room or college classroom, it always seemed that the room was too small to accommodate both the writers and their egos. Now I was one of them, too, so this little riff is a bit of self-inflicted criticism. It just always seemed that someone was trying to one-up someone else, or that the well intentioned bit of criticism had a sort of acidic barb on it- you know, too sharp, too poisonous to be misconstrued as simply innocent or well meaning. In fact, I recall one graduate fiction class that remains to his date a defining moment in my development as a writer.

In that class, oh, some fifteen men and women earning graduate credit for this seminar in fiction writing in the early 1990's, we had to produce and share a written draft. In short, we had to workshop it for the group. As the writer, you could not speak for the first bit of time (maybe fifteen minutes, I honestly can't remember) as the rest of class constructively ripped your story to shreds. My story, about a young woman who must decide between leaving her childhood home, mother, and grandmother for life with her fiance, had an opening scene in which the protagonist is putting on mascara. Now, in my early days, I had about as much experience with mascara as I do now. I was observant, so I drew on my experience of watching my wife put on her mascara in front of the mirror, and translated it to the story. But I got into trouble when I thought that a really cool visual metaphor would be to have the mascara form into little clumped balls and to have it fall on the vanity top below. Of course, I now know that mascara doesn't behave this way, but then I didn't have a clue.

There happened to be a woman in the class who either had it out for me or considered herself an expert on mascara. She lit into me like I had never been lit into before, essentially excoriating me for my lack of cosmetics knowledge, and concluding that my story lacked any real substance because of my tiny error on page one. I don't know why she slammed me the way she did- excessively- but she did, and it taught me a lesson. I learned quickly that I had to be able to weather the assaults of other, in essence to develop the proverbial thick skin that writers often talk about. Something like this never happens with students, at least not at the middle school level. I think they're so self-conscious that they may be afraid to lash out at others, but, then again, I've seen some pretty vicious middle schoolers, too, and they're really nasty when they do lash out.

The moral of the story is this: just write. Forget the critics, both inside and out, and just let it flow. In the end, the writing is what matters, not the responses. Tune them out and the world opens for you. Let them bug you and it becomes a closed, scary place.