Category Archives: writing

What I Hope My Students Got

So here is what I put in my Canvas for today, the last day of classes at Northeastern University:

Week 14 Overview

To-Do Date: Apr 19 at 11:59pm

Overview

Welcome to Week 14.  This semester, you learned a lot of things. Some of it I might even have taught you. Some of it your peers taught you. Some, you taught yourself. That is pretty much how life works.

Learning Objectives

What I hope you got from this class:

* We write alone, but we can’t only write alone.

* The world wants to tell you what to think, and sometimes that is a helpful shortcut, but when it isn’t helpful, you don’t have to let it.

* Writing can be hard, frustrating, and boring, but it doesn’t have to be.

* You are not always in control of your writing tasks (assignments, audiences, etc.) but you are in control of your writing process.

* Don’t write to make enemies or to change anyone’s entrenched ideas. Write to make allies.

* Write to make the world a better place. You might have to make yourself a better person first. The work is worth doing.

* Much of what you got through your education will prove useful. Reject anything that doesn’t help you repair the world.

* Who you are will always inform your writing, but you are in control of which bits to put in and which to leave out.

* We are firmly integrated in the material world, for better and for worse. We can try to make it more better and less worse.

* Thinking about the language you use, and being more intentional about choosing words and guiding metaphors, will improve your precision and persuasiveness.

* Also, ethos, pathos, logos and kairos, because those old Greek guys were hella smart.

*AND FINALLY, sometimes you just have to go into your back yard and spit.* But then put your mask back on.

*This is referencing David Huddle’s amazing essay, “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning.” 10/10. Highly recommend.

More Stuff I’ve Learned

So doing this long project of reading and writing fan fiction, I have learned a few things. First, I learned that stories have rhythms: action/inaction, noise/quiet, angst/fluff, questioning/answering, planning/executing. I feel like this is sort of like beats in a movie, but apparently there, a beat, according to Wikipedia, is an act or discovery that alters the way the main character goes about his/her purpose.

Second, people really love the word “smirk,” practically to a criminal extent.

Third, many, many people, people who consider themselves writers, are completely capable of having read fiction all their lives without actually ever learning the rules for punctuating dialogue. “This one bothers me most,” she said, smirking. I have probably left comments on this, encouraging people to look at their favorite novel to figure out the rules, maybe twenty times.

My Project, or At Least the Most Recent One

GSyPX-XS_400x400

So, to answer our pal, HeyLookAWriterFellow, who asked me what my project is, the answer is pretty much what you would expect from a writer. My project is procrastination.

But what might be less expectable is that the project I “should” be working on, the Great American Novel, has been replaced by the Great American FanFiction Magnum Opus. So I am putting off writing another two hundred pages of one project by writing almost 800 pages of another project.

People who know me well probably aren’t surprised by this. I can be remarkably constructive when the spirit hits me. Also, about 650 pages of that is based on Season Two of Supergirl, and the rest is a series of “one shots,” which are basically short stories, but linked together by a theme (in this case how all the characters got to be where they were by the time of the pilot, Season One, Episode One. Also a story about Pink Kryptonite which took way too long to get off the ground. Like twenty chapters or something.

But the beautiful thing about being a writing teacher is that as long as I am learning things from the process, it’s all good. And I have been learning a lot!

Writing Lesson of the Day

A few years back I worked with a very good writer who was getting an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Business. He came in after he had defended his very interesting thesis and threw himself into the chair beside me. He said, “I have figured out the one thing I have learned at Sloan.”

“What’s that?” I asked, curious.

“If your figure isn’t working, add arrows.”

Now on the one hand, he was kind of kidding, but really he also sort of wasn’t. When you are making a figure that explains some phenomenon, the arrows are the moving parts, the dynamic part of the system. So if your figure doesn’t she the important bit, of course it’s not going to work.

So the main thing I have learned from churning out angst and fluff and action and a few other things at a superhuman (yeah, it’s a pun, deal with it) rate these last two months is this:

(fanfare)

If your scene/story/chapter isn’t working, you are probably in the wrong point of view.

cat_pov

Why I’ve Been AWOL

Okay, so I have spent the last 71 days writing over 205,000 words of fan fiction for the TV show Supergirl, because the damn writers took a great show and started really fucking it up, putting the main character into a toxic and verbally abusive relationship, probably because the powers that be are trying to “balance” out the canon lesbian relationship and the show started getting very gay. And even Katie McGrath, who plays Lena Luthor, after Melissa Benoist told her about the existence of SuperCorp in fan hearts, rewatched the episodes she has played with Melissa and said, yes, it is completely reasonable. So yes. I have been AWOL here because I have been using my superpower of writing quickly and reasonably brilliantly because I have seen people on the Supergirl fan pages saying how triggered they are being by this iconic character dating a jerk.

 

But it has taught me the difficulties of sorting out POV when there are a lot of characters and action in a scene, the joys of dialogue, the ease/difficulty of capturing different characters’ voices, and a few other things. It turns out I am very good at writing yearning and very bad at writing snark, but maybe we knew that…18033287_10208755731351480_4425490238029206143_n

The Pointlessness of Writing Nonfiction

851789

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”            ― Gaston Bachelard

A week or so ago, I outlined a possibly essay, but I don’t know whether or not I actually need to write it. My usual outlines for nonfiction/personal/narrative essays consist of a list of topics and subtopics. The essay that comes out of an outline like that is exploratory in nature. The topics allow me to “try out” fitting ideas together and see if any of them fit my lived experience. When Michel de Montaigne invented the form we now call “essays” in English, he named it after the French verb “essayer”: to try. At its heart, I think that the personal essay should be a case of trial and error and discovery. If it is not, it is a different beast altogether.

It is, in fact, an expository essay, that bane of high school and college student existence, that thesis statement supported by subclaims and evidence and all that malarkey. I teach this every semester, so I am painfully familiar with the genre. It has great worth, particularly for political and social argumentation. I just find it a little boring to write.

The outline I wrote was of the second kind, more a list of premises and hypotheses: if this leads to this, then that leads to that. But here is the question: If I already know what the essay is probably going to argue, is there any point in writing it? What will I learn from turning sentences into paragraphs? It doesn’t seem to be a particularly publishable set of ideas, so if I won’t learn from it or be able to get a publishing credit for it, it feels like I should probably spend my time doing something else.

 

NaNoWriMo: When Procrastination Hits, and by Procrastination I Mean Life

So since November started, I have graded 38 second drafts, 38 first drafts and in the process of 38 quizzes. Also at MIT we moved from one building to another, which entailed packing and unpacking and rearranging and trouble-shooting. There was a party on Saturday, because God I needed that, and then right back into more grading, worrying about this election and trying to remember to eat at intervals.

grading-bingo

So, yes, for those of you who sounded surprised when I started my NaNoWriMo novel on the Fourth of July: this is why.

NaNoWriMo: Planning for the Home Stretch

[Previously I had a picture of a group of nazis when this post had been going to be about voting and avoiding turning America into a fascist nightmare from the 1930s. Then it wasn’t. I apologize to anybody who might have been offended or afraid of me.]

Okey-dokey. I have been working out in my gym now for more than six years. And six years is more than 300 weeks. That is a really long time. I have worked out alone and more usefully, I have worked out in group classes: first yoga, then Pilates, then spinning. All of these efforts teach us different things, especially if we are not looking to learn about working out physically but rather about writing.

Yoga is great for learning about how to manage your work for the long haul. As I have previously pointed out, my yoga teacher, Erica, made it very clear that pushing beyond what you feel you can comfortably do sometimes seems  non-constructive. You work “harder” than you should in a short amount of time. That is how you hurt yourself, which then makes you lose time that you could be using to get stronger, better, all the things. To avoid these ideas, Erica  would say things like, “Find your way into the pose. If it doesn’t work for you, pull back.”

That does not align with what I feel like we are taught in the United States and maybe in the Western world, and oh heck, maybe in the world. Work your f@@king ass off. The Protestant work ethic and the immigrant (read Roman Catholic ethnic) work ethic are functionally the same thing seen through different lenses. It still means that folks without privilege are encouraged by folks with privilege to work harder and harder to achieve even the slightest improvement in living conditions. Meanwhile, the more privileged live off the compound interest off their already invested capital, that invested by their fathers and grandfathers (and very, very rarely mothers and grandmothers).