[previously published at "The Flatland Oracles"]
I signed up (and paid $50) for a fiction-writing class because I thought I wanted to write fiction. I am not sure anymore that this is the case. I don't think it's lack of discipline because (obviously) I like writing other things; but when I try to write about anything I've imagined, the words just dry up. I feel that this is a left brain/right brain short circuit, since my characters, the setting, and even a lot of the events are all things I can imagine quite clearly, and yet when I sit down to try to write about them, the words just dry up. It's been happening for 20 years, so perhaps it isn't going to stop.
I was embarrassed tonight that I didn't have any work product to read, particularly since the fragment I read last time was almost meaningless. The problem I have with the concept behind the class is this: some work simply is NOT designed to be read aloud. I am not saying that it can't be, but that the writer simply hasn't written something that works very well when it's presented that way. I think I have a feel for words---indeed, I feel sure that I do---but the voice in my head that reads them is just so different from my normal hick accent that I fall to pieces when I try to read my own work.
But Nick is a fabulous reader. Our teacher, a fascinating Hungarian man who publishes under another name, has praised him for his theatrical reading. To quote Dickens (or rather a Dickens character in Our Mutual Friend), "he do the police in different voices." The only other person in the class who reads as well is a lovely young aspiring actress. She has a very beautiful voice and really makes her writing come alive.
I think most of the rest of the class are like me; they think of their writing as something for someone else to read. Even some of the most talented are as awkward as I am.
