Nervous About Teaching Creative Writing.

Tonight I’m teaching my first Creative Writing class at our local community college. It’s a continuing education program so I won’t be grading papers or scoring tests. It’s purely for people who are interesting in learning about being better writers.

I’m a bit nervous because, while I’ve taught a couple of college courses in the past and given writing workshops, I’ve never taught a course on Creative Writing.

To be sure, I can offer advice on the mechanics of writing. How you can go about developing characters that are interesting and memorable. I can show ways to create a protagonist who is relatable. I can talk about how you should “show” rather than “tell”. I can offer my thoughts on plot structure and even a few tricks about plot twists.

We can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of narrative viewpoint and how to write believable dialogue.

I’ll suggest that they read aloud what they write. It’s a great way to “hear” what’s been rattling around in their heads and then hammered out onto their laptops.

I’ll let them know that often it’s a good idea to leave your manuscript in a drawer and walk away from it for a few days or even a week or two. Then when you’re ready to write a revision, open the drawer and you’ll have a fresh set of eyes critiquing it.

But what I’d like them to do, more than anything, is to bring in some of their works in progress and read selected passages from them aloud to the class. I’m hoping the feedback they get will help them become stronger writers.

I’ve taken creative writing classes and was scared out of my wits to read what I’d written to a room full of people. Even to this day, I can speak to an audience about my books and my thoughts on writing, but reading from my novels still makes me nervous.

But the great thing is, in a creative writing class, you’re in a room full of people who share your passion. Everyone there has a joy for writing.

So, I think I can do a good job helping them with the mechanics of writing. But can someone teach creativity?

I’ve read articles that say that it can be taught and some that say that it can’t. There are exercises that can help strengthen someone’s creativity. But as an adult (and all my students at adults), unless you are already endowed with it, is it really possible to suddenly grow creativity if you don’t already have it?

Tonight, I’m going to ask each student what they hope to get out of the class, who their favorite writers are, and tell us about their ‘work in progress’? And if they tell me they don’t have a WIP, I’m going to have to ask them, “Why the hell not?”

Now, I’ll end this blog with three quotes:

“It aint’ whatcha’ write, it’s the way atcha’ write it.”—Jack Kerouac

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”—Ernest Hemingway

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do for them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”—Dorothy Parker

Writers and Multiple Personalities

My wife is not shy about giving me her opinion or ideas.  So when I asked her what she thought I might write about for this week’s blog, naturally, she had some thoughts.

“I took a photograph of your coffee cup that you leave in the sink every morning before you go to work.”

That’s your idea?

She smiled.  “In that moment that you put it there, you’re changing from one persona to another.  Here at home, you’re the writer.  When you walk out that door, you’re the president of the county’s Chamber of Commerce.”

There’s a little of that, I think.  Inwardly, I’m the writer all the time.  I’m constantly thinking of plot twists and dialogue and descriptions of characters.  But, certainly, in my office, my attention is prioritized to helping new businesses, improve the quality of life, working with the public school foundation, economic growth,  job creation, as well as much more.

To some degree, my wife is correct, however (although don’t tell her I admitted that).  I think writers have to have many personalities.  After all, in our books, we’re many people.

An old high school friend wrote to me last week telling me about a relative who has five distinctive personalities.  It’s created a life time of problems for their family.  Real life multiple personality disorder is serious stuff.

Of course I don't have the actual disorder, I think.  But writers have to be able to put on and take off multiple personalities.  We have to be able to think like our characters, talk like them, and act like them.

We are the good guys and the bad guys.

I’d like to think I can be as heroic, although less flawed, as my kick-ass heroine, Geneva Chase.

But obviously, I’m also the bad guy, because I’ve created him…or in my case, often many.  Where does that come from?  Is there a perverse, dark, evil person hiding in dark recesses of my psyche?

My editor sent me an email last week and this is how she described me after rereading Graveyard Bay, “such a warm cheerful persona covering up a dire, dreadful, bloodthirsty writer.”

Multiple personalities.

And as a writer, I hear voices, all the time.  Characters chatting away in my head while I drive to the grocery store, or as I walk down to the beach.  Thank heavens they go away while I’m in my work office.

They always come back, though, when I’m in my home office over our garage.

Multiple personalities that are the writer’s creations live and breathe in our books.  That’s why when we get a nasty review, and we do get them, it stings so much.  Our books are our world that we created out of nothing more than our imagination and experiences.

While I’m writing, characters that I’ve created often take on a life of their own.  They design their own plot twists or dialogue.  Often in directions that I didn’t originally see coming.

Crazy?

I’ve actually grieved after I’ve killed some characters in my books.  In my first book, Random Road, one of the main characters dies unexpectedly.  A neighbor of ours came up to me one day when I was walking the dog and said, “I’m really pissed off at your for killing that character off.”

I took it as a compliment.  That character was as real to her as he was to me.

Miraculously, while writing and imagining multiple personalities, we can snap back in a single moment and be ourselves again.

Or can we?

www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Confronting dull as dust

More thoughts on Sybil's and Aline's posts, both of which resonate so vividly with us all. It's so nice to feel we writers are not alone in our madness.

I have a twist to add to Aline's seven stages of writing. In my case, the desperation stage usually hits when I realize not only do I not have enough plot thrills and twists to fill 300+ pages, but the 64 pages I have written are as dull as dust.

I write two different types of books – my Rapid Reads novellas which are about 20,000 words, and my regular mystery novels, typically 90,000. The Rapid Reads have several constraints, including a linear storyline with no flashbacks or subplots, and a limited number of characters. I suspect we all cheat a bit on the subplot bit; they are, after all, often an integral part of the main plot.

Writing my full-length mysteries, I used to be a pure pantser writer, putting pen to paper as soon as I had the opening scene in mind and moving forward as each next scene came to me. Hence I never had an idea where I was going, how long it would take, and where I would land up. Everyone who writes this way knows how terrifying it can be. Periods of desperation, inspiration, and elation oscillate throughout the whole first draft. As I've evolved into more complex plots with several points of view, intersecting storylines and flashbacks, however, I've discovered that flying purely by the seat of my pants doesn't work too well; I need to keep track of where things are going and make sure the different storylines mesh. So I have developed a hybrid pantser/plotter style. I still don't know where the whole thing is going nor where it will end up, but I can see a half dozen scenes ahead and know what needs to come next.

I credit this change to my Rapid Reads experience. Because in the beginning, the publisher required a detailed chapter outline before sending the contract, I learned to think the story through from beginning to end, with each step along the way. I didn't enjoy it, but I discovered with a linear, 20,000 story, it was fairly easy to do. And it does make writing that first draft a much smoother, less terrifying process.

This is where the "desperation because this story is dull as dust" problem rears its head, however. What looked in the outline to be enough story to fill 20,000 pages turned out to be plodding and flat. Outlines do not give you the sense of drama that is needed to sustain interest. "And then he talked to the police and learned..." looks as if it should fill a chapter, but much more conflict is needed. Not just obvious, simple conflicts, like the cop doesn't want to talk to him, or the cop is dating his ex-wife, but an unexpected twist that adds a new dimension to the story and often takes it on another path entirely. Which is why I never liked outlines in the first place. Inspiration comes to me when I am deep in the scene, when a character says or does something, and I think "ahah! that's a way cooler idea!"

I am at that stage in my current Rapid Reads project. Halfway through, and aware that I need something to spice it up. The joke among crime writers is this is where you drop another body down the chimney, or send a woman through the door with a gun. But merely adding random twists will not always make a book more intriguing – we've all read books where we rolled our eyes and said "oh not another car chase, or explosion, or even dead body." The truly great twists come out of the story that came before and affect the characters on a powerful personal level. They need to deepen the tension, raise the suspense, and confound the characters as well as the readers.

A neat trick. Finding that perfect twist is the challenge of this "dull as dust" stage. I fret and argue and reread and ask "What if? What else? What is the worst that can happen?" And sometimes I just carry on, hoping the inspiration will fall into my lap somewhere down the line. Sometimes it only comes during the rewrites. All I can do is hope that eventually it does. Stay tuned.