Writer's Workshop

It's a warm spring day in Tucson, Arizona, and a line at the local community college stretches from the front of the theater to the parking lot. Only one college student staffs the check-in table, and he moves slowly, sifting through the piles of folders in front of him and encouraging each person to fill out a stick-on nametag. Most of those in the line are gray-haired, and many know each other. I feel out of place.

There are a few younger folks, most younger than myself. In their twenties, maybe. I am impatient, I don't want to miss any part of the workshop. My backpack, stuffed with a netbook, two notebooks, a water bottle and some luna bars, hangs heavy on my shoulders, and I need to sit down, take it off, give my neck a rest. I have knots in my neck and back from the last two weeks of work, knots that are like cement and make sleeping and sitting a painful chore.

I do, finally, make it inside, where an arctic blast of air conditioning freezes my blood. I thought I prepared for this--cargo pants, sneakers, a sweater--but even with the hood on my heavy-duty sweater up over my head and tied under my chin, I am shivering. The first speaker drones on and on in academic terms about how a story needs to go somewhere and has to be interesting to the audience. Duh, I think, and I leave early, shivering my way out of the auditorium into the bright, warm sunlight.

The next session is much better. The presenter speaks in simple prose, and his workshop is on--no surprise here!--simple prose. How to write a story in three sentences. Simple sentences. Noun, verb, object. He makes us write a character study first, walking us through, step-by-step. I like steps. This makes the anal part of me very happy. Then we get to pad our sentences, making them bigger and longer and more elaborate. This is fun. Except for when some folks volunteer to read theirs, and other yell at them--in angry, disrespectful tones--to speak up. (The presenter would have chided me for that last sentence, the way I dropped a clause in the middle of it. That's not simple. Sorry. I have an inner Faulkner that tends to come out, unless I keep a short lease on him. Tough to do. And sometimes--I'm sorry--I just don't want to.)

I am on edge, the caffeine from my morning coffee having nowhere to go. I don't normally just sit, absorbing information. I go, and go, and go some more. I see a few former classmates, and we walk to lunch, where we talk about writing and the last semester and share stories. This, I like. This connection with people who understand.

The next session is back in Antarctica again. I don't want to go, but I'm bored sitting outside, so I brave the cold. The author is funny. She talks about her experiences as a Chicana growing up in California, the roundabout way she became a writer. She says something offhand about her last two books--YA books, "Gossip Girl for Latinas"--and how, when writing them, she had a whole team behind her. Focus groups and everything. Really? That's how best-selling YA novels are made? With focus groups to ensure that what's written will sell?

Unsettled and unsure, I made my way to the next session. Oh, good. It's an author who set his book in Tucson, and I've seen this book a few places recently, including Poets & Writers magazine. I'm excited to hear him talk about character development. But he uses a scene from his novel as his study for the class, a scene that includes a child and is disturbing to me. I leave the room. It's the second time today I've left a session early.

I head to the bookstore and find a couple books on writing that interest me. I have a hard time buying these books; I don't have much money, and it always feels sort of strange to be buying books with titles like, "You Can Write a Novel!" and "Finding Time to Write!" (A Seven-Step Guide to Writing a Best-Selling Novel!), but the authors have some interesting things to say, more interesting than I've heard in the workshop today, and I think maybe they'll inspire me.

I head to a local coffee shop, intent on using my remaining time on learning something, anything, writing-related. I dive into a book, and find a lot of food for thought. This, I like. This time and space to think about and absorb ways to bring regularly scheduled writing into my already-overfilled life.

In musing over the day, I realize this seems to be my general experience at workshops or book fairs or even lunches put on by local professional genre writing groups. An author speaks, usually about the same thing--character, plot, motivation, story arc--and it's becoming a drone to me. Like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons. I worry this is a bad thing. Shouldn't I be open? Isn't that how one learns? By listening and being humble? If I think I keep hearing the same thing and it's nothing new to me, am I closing myself off from something important? Am I thinking I'm better than I am?

Okay, maybe I did learn something today (from the book I perused in the coffeeshop). The author suggested going back through journal entries to see if you can glean a theme from them. See what seems to be most important to you. (Then write about it; use your stories as a way to explore that theme.) I realized the majority of my journal entries are about doubt. I'm unhappy; am I making the right decision? What do I do about it? Should I stay where I am? Or leave? And I look back at that last paragraph in this blog post, and realize I'm doing it again: doubting myself. And then I wonder: is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is that okay? Should I continue trying these workshops? Or should I leave?