So I've started teaching people how to write. Or, I've started teaching a writing class? I've certainly been obsessing about the difference between the two proposals. What it is people sign up for when they sign up for a writing class: what they expect, and what I can reasonably expect of myself. 

In part this whole Thing is just about how I don't have an MFA, how I got rejected from every writing class I applied to in college, this (very common!) sense that other people understand how to "do it" but that I do not, that despite two published novels and a year of supporting myself freelancing, I'm still some kind of amateur unqualified to represent herself as any kind of authority on the subject. It's just, like, worked out so far, I guess????

But then, beyond that, there this: I don't know if you can teach anyone how to write.

This is probably largely because I learned it outside of a classroom, but I understand the process mostly as a collection of habits and instincts developed over the course of years: reading constantly, voraciously, and critically; analyzing how and why stories work for you across mediums and genres; memorizing images and putting words to them; memorizing phrases for their cadence; watching associations between thoughts and facts and memories and ideas swirl in your mind until they start to cohere into something with the gravity of a single piece. When I was twenty three, before I had any idea I might ever get to write for someone other than myself, I kept a blog so that I would never have an excuse not to write when I started to see a piece take shape. I only understand the technique of writing as a lifetime of training your reader's ear, so that I can skim through my own sentences at some remove and say: works, works, works, doesn't, and then fix it until it does. 

How do you say that to someone who wants to learn, "fix it until it does"? At first I wasn't going to teach any craft essays in this class, in large part because I've basically never read any. Eventually, though, I came around to it. Teaching art is sort of an impossible task, and it's not just me. So here is the grammar, here are the lessons, that people who've done this before have developed. Here are some technical things you can focus on while you're getting in the habit of being a writer every single minute of your fucking life. I mean. If you want to be good, that's the way you do it, right? Until it's so natural that even you, the writer, don't have the language for how it works anymore?

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I am going to make an effort to talk about writing, though, along with a bunch of other delightful YA authors at Not Your Mother's Book Club in San Francisco this Thursday, 7/27. If you're in the neighborhood, please come say hi!

Also, if you're new to this Tinyletter (many of you are, thanks Ann), you can read my books or check out other assorted writing. If I were you I might start with this recent one on how Eve Babitz and Francesca Lia Block made LA literary or the differences in how male and female artists are allowed to write about their muses or maybe something on Kim Kardashian and nudes but also whatever, it's up to you.