Moving Too Fast

It's been a while, I know. Life got busy, and in the meantime, I've been writing! Yay! Today was workshop day and I already had a lot to write before that, so this may be a rather long post. Maybe that can make up for the post I missed.

Getting started writing and getting all the kinks out of my plot, (ok well not all) was really slow going, but once I finally got that smoothed out, the writing hasn't been that horrible. In fact, I think I almost enjoyed it. Enjoying writing, what a novel concept. (Ha. No pun intended).

As I started writing, I realized I have left out a rather huge chunk of my plot; I wanted to explore a librarian's visions that are a mimicry of a particular student's problem. I just forgot to think up what exactly that problem was. Well that's a problem for me. I have to start writing, but I don't really know what should go in the visions because even I don't know what they pertain to. For the purposes of forward movement, I kind of just wrote whatever came to mind, figuring that I could fix for continuity later. Maybe something would come to me as I kept trying different things.

My initial thought was to make the problem deal with a relationship issue; either the nonexistence of one, or one at the end of it's lifespan. It seems like it would be a realistic problem for a high school girl to have without giving the story the melodrama that I think heavier topics like rape or thoughts of suicide would. But I was afraid that a problem of relationships was not weighty enough. I don't want the story to seem inconsequential or take on the aspects of a romance novel.

It's funny how sometimes the answers just fall into your lap.

I got a Facebook message last Thursday saying that my best friend from junior high died in a car accident Wednesday night. We hadn't spoken in years, partially due to just going separate ways and partially because we had a very bad falling out. We weren't just apart, we were not friends. I suppose in some ways it made things easier. I think it must be easier to experience the death of a not-friend, a former friend, than someone who is currently a big part of your life. I wouldn't know. But there is a certain amount of guilt in it too. The last interaction I had with her was defriending her on Facebook. Seemed inconsequential at time. We just weren't friends. Why would I want to share info with and see updates on a person I don't speak to? She friended me but never reached out, so I doubt she cared much. In retrospect it seems petty. And I never ever thought it would be the last thing we did.

I had no real intentions of mending the friendship, not even a fantasy about meeting when we were older and different and becoming friends again. But I guess part of me always thought that some sort of reconciliation might occur because it feels bad now to know that it can't. I already missed who she used to be, but that's not at all the same as knowing she's not even on this Earth anymore. I didn't think very highly of her as she grew up, although I always thought she would turn out a good person when she was an adult- married with kids and stuff. But now that I know she didn't get that far, I don't know what to think. It doesn't seem fair to die without getting the chance to redeem yourself. And I feel horribly guilty and petty and small to even think the thought that she needed redemption based on how she treated me in Eighth Grade and what her Facebook photos showed me of her college life. It's not that I think she was a bad person. I don't. Didn't. Even when she treated me in what I think/thought to be poorly, I didn't think she was a bad person, but I did think that she would be a better person as an adult. And she doesn't get the chance. So what now?

She was also an English major. She wanted to teach. I'm pretty sure she won't mind getting a role in my story and I think it might help me rid myself of some of the guilt. At the very least, to me, she can be immortalized here. So that's Marlene's issue. Her former best friend died, and she's both sad and feels guilty that they weren't even friends anymore. The visions are kind of empathetic fantasy-realities projected from Marlene. The main character there looks like Ms. Colvin because Marlene looks up to Ms. Colvin. The second character is an adult and angelic representation of Marlene's friend. There they get to confront some of the unspoken issues: the guilt, the accusations, the saddness. And with Ms. Colvin as witness, it's her job to get Marlene to admit these things to herself, in the real world. I think the way Ms. Colvin will find out is by a newspaper clipping of the obituaries. Marlene uses it as a bookmark and Ms. Colvin recognizes the face from her visions.

Writing this all here helps me get excited again. I had fun writing the first ten pages, even if I do think most of what I wrote will have to be cut out before the end. But after the workshop, I don't have even the slightest desire to write again. It's coming back at least a little now.

I like to think that I'm not horrible at taking criticism. Lord knows I have received my share of it in music, art, and writing. I know that I'm not the best at it, but I don't think that I'm not the worst at it either. That's how I know that there's something wrong with some of the criticism I received from this class. Peer criticism, in my experience, has always been all over the place. Some is helpful, some is not, some people are too harsh, some people are too nice. This is the first time in my entire college education that I have ever experienced the kind of disrespect and rudeness that I saw in this class. In defense of the class as a whole, it was really only one person who was so offensive. That student went so far as to write, "The best advice I think I can offer you is to go read some short stories, because if I didn't know any better, I'd think you'd never encountered one before". There is absolutely no reason for that kind of incivility and it really undermines the whole workshop aspect. Whereas before I had been excited about writing and ready to continue with my story, this one person got so under my skin that all my excitement completely dissipated. It's not that I think his words or opinion matter, because they don't, but it's hard to want to write something to be workshopped by such an apathetic set of peers. The obvious answer is to realize that I'm not writing for them.

In all fairness, plenty of people had nice things to say, or at the very least were perfectly civil and constructive in their criticisms, but I honestly think that half way through the first draft is a terrible time to receive workshop criticism. It's not only a waste of time and unhelpful, but I think it's actually harmful to the creative process. Many of the weaknesses or errors that were pointed out in my work were things that I could certainly have corrected on my own, I just need to have a complete draft first. With all the stories that we've workshopped so far, there seems to be a lot of critiques in the form of suggesting new plots. People see the first half and start guessing at the second, or, if given a summary of the second half, start suggesting changes for it because the first half doesn't lead up to the second as well as it should. The author's intended story arc does not need to be re-written for them just because they way they started doesn't match up quite right with where they want to end. That's natural. There'd probably be something wrong if it did. But that's something you can really only fix after completing the first rough draft. And in the mean time, getting a lot of negativity dumped on you in the middle of writing a draft makes it so hard to write the rest.

Now I'm not the kind of person who can easily organize and complete big projects without some concrete guidelines and deadlines set out for me. I think I maybe could be if I didn't always have so much other stuff going on. And I'm guessing that's pretty true for everyone that goes to Truman. So I definitely appreciate this have the first half done by X date. I just hate workshopping then. I think what would work really well in this scenario is to have a halfway-point deadline, where everyone must bring the first half of their work in to class, get points just for having it done, make sure they really do have it done, and from there break into small discussion groups. Once we start writing I'm pretty sure we all know where we are struggling; I imagine that we all have questions we would like answered. Since we all have different strengths and weaknesses I even think we could help each other out pretty efficiently. I know already where I am struggling in this story. I know what questions I could ask. I think the small group discussion paired with the deadline would be a way more useful structure for creating a semester-long work rather than trying to criticize a project that's really still just a child. That hardly seems fair.

Regardless, I have some ideas for what to change in my draft, although as much as I may want to change them right now, I know it's important for me to first just move forward; get the rest of the draft done. I think this story could be a good one, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Two months left? Where has the semester gone?