preaching to the choir

I have taught, let's say, a hundred+ aspiring writers over the course of the last seven years. I have taught beginning fiction classes, novel workshops, revision techniques, and about sex scenes for a romcom boot camp, as well as various types of non-fiction. (Obligatory plug for our upcoming HEA WTF!) 

A lot of these people don't aspire to, as they say, quit their day jobs. Some have big dreams, but most are just curious-- interested in fleshing out an idea, or finding out what it takes to dig in and finish a draft. Some just want a creative hobby, which I'm always very happy about. I think we could all use more creative hobbies. 

So something that comes up, especially when we talk about the work of revision, is: why? Why bother doing this if you aren't going to go pro? 

The argument for having hobbies has been made by better minds than mine. But I think writing is an especially good thing to pursue for its own sake, because it forces you to spend so much time finding out what and how you think. The terror of the blank page is not unrelated to the terror of sitting down to meditate, at least for me, because both activities force me to be alone with my mind for extended periods of time. To stop yapping and yammering at myself, and instead try to harness, and focus. To pay good, careful attention. I often compare the experience of reading your own work back to hearing your voice on a recording-- it's disorienting, especially at first, because it doesn't look or sound the way it usually does, when it's reverberating inside of your skull.

I am thinking about this today because, of course, someone announced an AI product designed to help with longform fiction projects this morning. (I mean, please god, only use it for fiction-- AI simply does not turn up reliable facts!!) The creators are pitching it as, basically, just like having a writing partner, and I do see their logic. Sometimes you need someone (or in this case, something) to bounce your ideas off of, to say or do something that unlocks the story for you in a way you wouldn't have been able to achieve on your own. (For instance, my friend MMc recently gave me notes that allowed me to start overhauling that long-suffering, three-years-in-progress book project I wrote to you about last week.) 

But and also. Ideas are so cheap. My personal running bit is pitching romcoms in response to basically anything happening in my life, and any of those ideas might be the right basis for a novel or a script. They might! But transforming my three sentence pitch (okay, so basically, not-Pete Davidson wants to be taken seriously as an actor now, but to do that he needs to tone down his Lothario image, and his reps are like, why don't we have you fake-date a normal girl so you can appear to be all settled down and get the part, and then be on set with your hot co-star without triggering a ton of speculation, AND THEN HE FALLS IN ACTUAL LOVE WITH THE NORMAL GIRL) into a story worth reading in full requires investing time in character development, in backstory, in setting the scene around these people and creating individual arcs that will complement and reinforce but not just boringly echo one another. 

It also requires writing sentences. 

I rarely focus on sentences when I teach, because we're basically always dealing in first drafts. Except in specific cases, I advise against getting bogged down obsessing about a comma in a phrase that might not make it to draft three, let alone draft ten or fifteen. 

But eventually, they become the whole fucking point. Sentences are what your story is comprised of. Each little unit builds, adds, contradicts, complicates. Everything the reader learns about your world and your characters, they learn from your sentences.

And sentences are made up of words, but they are also made up of choices. (Why a comma and not a period between words and but in that last sentence? Either would have been grammatically correct. Why use the word choices and not decisions? Is there a difference? Do I care? Will someone else? Do I care about their opinion?) 

It's incredible how much of the act of writing is making choices, and then figuring out why you made those choices, and then making or not-making different ones. Deciding: what you want to express, what you think your reader will accept, what you value, what you're willing to discard. To write, if you do it carefully, is to learn how you make decisions, and how you express those decisions and the values that drive them. To study how you write is to learn so much about how you think.

I really try not to weight in on the questions of what makes a person "a writer." Personally, I am not particularly interested in adhering to an identity category; I just want to do the work, because being "a writer" does nothing for me. The hour I just spent at a coffee shop, banging this out, engaging with my own ideas: that's what I need, and what I want. Everything else is fucking gravy.

But if you are not interested in doing that work-- taking responsibility, and time. Making choices. Digging in, and in, and exhausting yourself, and boring yourself, and scaring yourself-- well, I don't know, maybe you're still a writer. But it's hard to imagine that you're going to write something that's worth much to anyone. Especially to the person all of this matters most to, at least in theory: your own fucking self. 

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If you... didn't hate all of that, and actually maybe even liked it? I'm going to be teaching a Beginning Fiction workshop starting in June. Details:

Beginning Fiction
Mondays, June 12-August 7 (no class on July 3)
6:30-8:30 pm Pacific 
on Zoom!