Green Darning

It was billed as “writing that first novel”. And, whatever else I might say, it is that. The class is designed to help the student get a good start on a salable novel. But the methodology feels wrong to me. This isn’t about creative writing. It’s about writing what people will want to buy. I hadn’t really understood until last night’s class that my writing might not fall into that category.

Teacher is very firm. Some quotes from last night’s session:

There is no room for coincidence in your story. This came out when someone described a point of their plot where two people ran into each other in a grocery store. She emphasized that it had to somehow be an arranged meeting, stating it couldn’t just happen. She went on to deprecate what she called “Deus ex Machina” which for her encompasses all coincidence.

Must have a life or death situation. Wha’ huh? I was informed that I needed such a situation for my plot to carry any real weight.

The cavalry cannot come; the protagonist must solve the problem on his own. This was in reference to another person’s proposed plotline where an estranged son gets assistance from his mother to solve a problem

You must have a protagonist fighting an antagonist. This one was in reference to a summary plot where the main character fights his own demons, and not an outside force.

“The main character must be good. Their antagonist must be bad.” No comment.

I grant you, none of this is bad advice, in a general sense. But put it all together in an inflexible rulebook, and you aren’t doing creative writing. You’re writing by formula. What really sticks in my craw is that when it comes to actually selling your book to a publisher, this really is the right approach. Find a formula that sells books, and then crank out one novel after another that uses it. V.C. Andrews, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, John Grisham … a whole raft of big authors do that. Heck, it even works for Nancy Drew. The problem is, I don’t want to write Nancy Drew books.

Can I learn by her approach? Probably. Problem is, I got my little ego smashed last night when I was informed that I must be confused over what “protagonist” and “antagonist” means (See “main character must be good; antagonist must be bad” quote). Well, yeah, I guess I was. I thought the protagonist propelled the plot forward, while the antagonist was their main obstacle (not necessarily human). I didn’t want to go there though. Teacher is quite adamant about how our novels should be written, and I subscribe to the philosophy where you don’t argue with a teacher in class. I doubt she’d take kindly to anyone questioning her how-to-write philosophy anyhow.

And let’s face it, if I can’t write in the face of criticism, then I shouldn’t even be thinking about public writing anyhow. There are always going to be experts who don’t like something about my way of doing things, whether it is how I write or something else, like how I live my life. Maybe it’s worth the price of admission just to get my skin toughened up a bit.

Another thing that annoyed me about last night was one of our assignments that was due. We were supposed to write three “Idea Summary Worksheets” for three different novels. I did three, two based on ideas I was playing with, and a third just because I needed a third to fulfill the assignment requirements. In class we were called on to read one. When no one volunteered, I was the unlucky one arbitrarily picked to go first. I wasn’t ready to talk out loud about my two potentially real projects (besides, another one of her rules is that a “real author” never talks about their work to other people) so I elected to read the third, throwaway summary. After mine was trashed and she’d proceeded to the next person, she announced that the ones we read aloud tonight were the ones we would be working on for the rest of the course.

Perhaps it’s just as well.

This morning was cool and misty, hardly an auspicious start for an early summer day. When I arrived at work, I spotted something sitting on the window shutter of the storage building directly next to my office. I was able to walk up to within inches of it. The cool had made it sluggish and unwilling to fly. I got perhaps the closest I’d ever been to one of the big dragonflies.

Both size and color were what I’d expect of a dragon. It was the most amazing shade of emerald green, with wings the color of iced air that spanned an area larger the length of my hand. Over the course of the next five hours I made periodic checks on it. When it hadn’t moved for three hours or so, I was afraid it was dying, which made me feel protective and more than a little concerned for it.

After lunch, when the dragonfly had sat unmoving on the shutter for over five hours, I decided it would be safer if I lifted it up and carried it to my window box, which I’ve planted with pink and violet geraniums for the summer. By this time the sun had come out, and the day was finally warming up. This time I only got to within three feet of it. It must have been sitting on that metal shutter waiting to catch the sun and warm up, because this time when it saw me approach it took off and flew up and over the building. I was sorry I’d disturbed it, but at the same time we have dozens of birds that hang out in the parking lot, including a batch of very misguided seagulls. I would have hated to see someone make a mid-day snack out of him.

(Mine! Mine!)

I’m having a shred-fest in my office this week. I’ve several drawers of documentation on things I’ve done here at work for the last five years. I have been informed that we are now to keep only two years of anything that the federal regulations don’t specifically state we need to keep more of. That means I’ve a little over three years worth of paper to trash. We were further told that if our paper work contained certain kinds of information, it had to be shredded prior to disposal. All but about two-dozen sheets of paper of mine qualify for shredding, hence the shred-fest.

All this close contact with a shredder has taught me several things. Shredders are noisy. Shredders create a lot of dust. Shredded paper takes up far more space than it’s unshredded equivalent. And shredding is incredibly boring work.

It’s also more than a little weird, watching three years of my life getting turned into little pieces of confetti. I wish I could have saved this job for when I was in a more destructive mood.