I’m attending my first writing class in decades

And it feels great to be there

This week I began the Zoetrope Fiction Writing class at Gotham Writers. It’s the first prose writing class I’ve taken since undergraduate school, and I’m excited. I received a Josie Rubio Scholarship from Gotham and thought the award would be best applied to taking a fiction class.

Someone asked me, with all my writing background why am I taking a level one class? My answer is how could I not?

As I’ve written about, I’m returning to fiction after decades away, and it’s been a process to relearn the right ways to think, build up those dormant craft muscles, and generally scrape the rust off. I’m currently working on two novels – the first one is complete but I decided to go back and do a substantial revision, which I’ll talk about another time, and the second is about two-thirds the way through a first draft. While I’m waist-deep in my work right now sometimes it feels like I’m over my head.

I feel the need to go back to basics, or rather to re-establish my understanding and control of the basics. I want to strengthen my ability to feel confident in my writing and my storytelling instincts. After a couple of years back in the game, my craft still feels splotchy. Some things I’m sure of, others I’m just not certain if I know what I’m doing. I strongly want to focus on fundamentals right now.

It is a lot like what happened when I wanted to start playing tennis again a number of years ago (long before my knee turned on me). I had been an excellent tennis player, number one on my high school team and a teaching pro in New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. I knew how to play the game. Unfortunately, after years away from the court and screwing up my strokes by playing racquetball, my body only had partial muscle memory. My backhand was solid, but my forehand was a bit of a mess. My serve was a little off in everything. My lateral movement was embarrassing. So I joined one of those adult classes, where a tennis pro worked with people who wanted to learn the game. I thought going back to basics would help. And it did. There were some weird moments, such as the time he was showing us how to hit an overhead at the net and when it was my turn I pounded it so hard I think some of the others were a little frightened (“nice to know my overhead is still intact” I thought at the time). But generally, it was a good thing and I met a few others I could arrange to play sets with.

I assume this fiction class will be similar. It’s a ten-week workshop with lectures, exercises, and critiques, with an emphasis on short stories. There are sixteen of us, from all over North America, with diverse backgrounds including marketing, academia, publishing, memoir, journalism, and business operations. It’s an impressive group of smart, talented people and I’m looking forward to working with them.

One of the great things about taking a class as an adult is that you fully appreciate the opportunity to learn, and you know that you only get out of it what you put into it. It’s a pleasure to do everything the instructor requests and then some. It feels like graduate school again, applying clear-eyed analysis to my own work and the work of others, taking things apart and putting them back together, letting the instructor push you into a corner you need to work yourself out of. What fun!