i start my fiction writing class tomorrow. i’m nervous as hell. it’s like first day of school jitters only 394 times worse. i mean, what if they don’t like me? what if they think i’m a bad writer? what if i’m not good enough? what if they point their fingers and laugh at me? what if they are all super snobby “real” writers and they only think of me as some cheap two-bit sellout copywhore? i am never going to be able to sleep tonight.
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Jodi, enhance your calm. They’ll all be running around barefoot because you’re going to knock their socks off.
Seriously though, your mind has so much fiction locked in it, it seeps into your dreams. Just let it flow from your fingertips.
Good luck, as if someone with your “mad skillz” needs luck.
This may not happen to you, but…
One of my coworkers took a psychology course at the “U” recently. She’s a thirtysomething clubber too and was shocked at the startling degree of cluelessness infecting the next generation. She said the class was full of 19 year olds who couldn’t say more than 3 words in a row without a “like” between them.
jodi, one thing you have to remember is that you have many things on your side. a writer can be successful if they put in the effort and have a passion for their work. you have passion, wit, creativity, experience, emotion, a past, hurt, love, anger, sadness, pride, joy, and so on. This is what makes a writer great…the width of their experience in mental and physical ways as well as the desire and innate ability to create pictures with words. You do it every day, you dont need a clas full of college students to like your work in order to know you’re any good…you already know you are. Get as much as you can from the class, which inludes giving pieces of your experience and ability to those in the class who can benefit. Good Luck!
Jodi, I truly wish you a 100% positive experience here. Just concern yourself with the writing, not anybody else’s opinion.
I have only taken one class in my adult life, a poetry class “taught” by Joy Harjo, one of my fave poets. The first thing I learned was that Joy was pretty much phoning it in. There were, maybe, 20 students. One was older than me, no, two. One of those women and I were the only people in the room besides Ms. Harjo who had ever made our livings writing.
The other 17 were horrible undergrads, all smug, all of whom knew each other, and they were TERRIBLE writers. I remember one of them — who hinted that she had been a hooker in Reno (lah-dee-dah) — wrote a poem including the line “hiding it under my skirts like a puppy with parvo.” Another one, the Sensitive, High-Strung skinny redhead with the expensive glasses, wrote a poem in which she said: “i feel like a lung wrapped in twine.” A lung wrapped in twine!, what the FUCK does THAT mean??? And Joy, whose ambition was elsewhere, would act as if this posturing was — well, like they were writing well. “That’s interesting…” And I wanted to scream, No, it’s NOT. It’s masturbation pure & simple.
I immediately went into shutdown & the only poems I could submit after that were ones I had already written & HATED! When one of the older women submitted a poem about having to pee each morning at 4, I decided to drop the class. Call me a quitter, but quitting has often been the right move on for me.
So I hope the class is really inspiring, and that you don’t, uh, feel like a lung wrapped in twine. At least not too often.