I had another great…

I had another great writing class last night. At least, I thought it went great -- hope the students did too. We started talking about what it takes to call yourself a writer, and the focused in on character. Reviewed the Mary Sue, discussed our favorite characters (and why they're our favorites), talked about stereotypes and archetypes, did a few exercises -- the one that worked best was one where I split them into pairs and had them interview each other about their character. I participated too, and I learned a few things about one of the characters in my YA novel. Useful and fun! (Unlike the writing the character's dream exercise, which they mostly didn't seem to find so helpful. Oh well.)

Next class, they're going to bring in actual scenes for us to workshop. That should be interesting. We'll talk about how a scene classically meant a series of actions taking place in a single setting (see theater), but how that gets much looser with fiction. We'll discuss how every scene should ideally accomplish multiple things -- advance the plot, reveal character, show conflict, create suspense, give information, create atmosphere, develop theme, etc. (Generally not all of those at once. :-) We'll discuss summarizing versus dramatizing, and the virtues of both. And we'll focus in on point of view. They're reading two of my stories that have unusual points of view, "Pieces of the Heart" and "Lakshmi's Diary" -- they seemed to like the two stories of mine they read last week, so that's a relief. It's fun teaching POV -- it's so very concrete and easy to teach as a result. Sometimes I envy math and science teachers -- everything they teach is that concrete. Must be nice.

I really do love teaching creative writing -- if I had infinite time and money, I would just do it for free, every week. Writing makes people so happy. :-)

Plan for today -- get kids ready and drop them off, write and do e-mail from 9-11, go to Advanced Cabinets and Home Depot to get comparison quotes on kitchen cabinets, unpack and do dishes (still working on party dishes!) in the evening.

Our bedroom is still impassable, although the rest of the house is pretty close to unpacked. We moved right around a month ago -- what's a reasonable amount of time to take to unpack a three-bedroom house? I am tired of unpacking. I want to be done!

(Maybe in six months, I'll be packing again? For possibly the last time! Fingers crossed.)