The sun was going down as I backed out of the driveway to head off to the first session. I’d dropped by the city’s Recreation office and paid ahead for 8 weekly sessions, and wondered if I shouldn’t instead have just shown up at the writer’s workshop with a check that I might release by hand. At least I’d made a commitment - not an easy thing for this old Libra always balancing and weighing. Now I was on the way – maybe a little late. It’s a time in my life though when I shouldn’t feel this need to rush -- enough with the Type A. My mind does dizzy circles as ideas flit and I hit low feelings thinking I may never know how to put a story together. How is it that I can read so much and not have a clue how it’s done? Getting lost, I guess.

                        Sam knows what he’s talking about and he’s said it before. I skimmed his book and knew that I wanted to benefit from the wisdom if I could. Writing of this sort doesn’t seem to be what I thought.  Long winded description is probably what I’ve done. How does one manage to get into the head of their characters? How does one get a character to stand still enough to demonstrate integrity through multiple scenes? Sam’s thing seems to be murder mysteries – all spaced a year or so apart in the travels of a singular character. Amazing continuity. Maybe mysteries are different.

                        All around the room with four of us budding artists. I think two had brought copies of their draft books and seemed to know the plan. But Sam will only take six pages, so bring copies for everybody next time and over the week follow the guidelines for providing feedback. Nobody will be able to benefit from my hand-scratching. Footnotes on digital versions would be my preference. Obviously I’m not running the show. It’s different being a student for a change. Professors can’t get part-time work, I once heard – they’re too arrogant to be influenced. It’s a problem living without consequence or feedback from adults, I suppose. Imagine getting jerked around as a student and being told whether your writing is any good or not. I never was one for red marks.

                        Everybody took the floor and said something about themselves. It was a cavernous white room full of reflected sound from windows to nowhere and chalk boards to bounce sound across linoleum tile and around fold-up tables. It’s hard for me to hear and straighten out the echoes, even with the little audio processors resting on my ear tops. I was caught a little flat footed without a book yet in the works and said that the big challenge would be to defeat my internal voices telling me that I couldn’t write. Sam didn’t seem to like that and I think he wanted to move on to somebody else, though I went on about not having a clear goal -- maybe wanting to learn how to craft a short story. Maybe Sam knew the prognosis was bad. He made helpful points about differences between stories and novels and he doesn’t seem to think there’s much value in aiming only at something sparce if emotionally memorable. He’s probably right that they don’t sell. Maybe they’re a place to start. For sure he lets people make their own decisions.

                        “I’m thinking short because I need to do some exercises - like A, B, C, and see if I can get something flowing.” Exercises, he thinks, aren’t the way to go. I understand not getting lost in rules, but maybe my challenge is to let go and get fluid -- somehow being myself. Should I aim to be a stream of consciousness dude? I’ll try to remember to google how to do that. Maybe if that’s a place for me to start my magic will be the grueling job of reorganizing whatever comes out for some post-hoc structure. Maybe I’m a copy and paste, edit and revise forever kind of guy.  Maybe I’ve never gotten to a space of being myself without some obsessive planning. I was so paralyzed the first time that I taught psychology that I had to have every single thing I was going to say down on paper. And I needed those guides close for months before they turned into hip pocket plans.

                        Gail Cinnamon is interesting. I’ve never known a person with such a fascinating name. River bottom grower from exotic settings -- super healthy for you. Some sort of entrepreneur who wrote technical or financial stuff and got wiped out by one or another of the recent recessions. She thinks she wants to write fantasy stuff. I don’t know if she added “full of high tech” or if I made the leap thinking about Charles Wu’s mind blowing short stories. Sam’s big test will be whether or not her fantasy “works”. I’m not at all sure that I heard it right, but I think the draft  book she had with her is written from the perspective of a house? Jesus.. I can’t wait for that one! Rita teaches law at least part-time and presents at conferences on intellectual property issues. I think of her as single and living alone without a dog though I’m ready to be surprised. She writes plays - with one having been optioned forever and driving her crazy with bouts of acceptance and setbacks. Romantic stuff I bet. Sam’s impressed. I have no idea how I could help.

                        Cynthia could wind out the most interesting or hugest disappointment. The way she says it, she just learned that she’s got a writer in there and it came as a shock, though she’s always taking on impossible jobs and seeing them through. It wasn’t long ago that she wanted something done around her house and so took up carpentry -- wound up subdividing her land and building three houses, mastering Real Estate it seems, to market them well. Lately she’s been waking up with full stories in her head ready to write. Some are short, but there are 70 of them we hear. But then they stopped and so she signed up to get going again and become a writer. She seems to be a fairly recent California transplant from an old Ohio Victorian farmhouse that the brush hadn’t been cleared away from for forty years. She ran a hardware store part time and devoted her life to hand feeding ill parents. She’s an artist – the sort who does watercolors with the precision of oil.  So we’ll see what comes of that. People write for the strangest reasons.

                        I haven’t done my six pages for Sam this week, and I’m not sure that I will. I’m wondering if I’m rebelling like my students seem to, but I don’t think so. This will work. Before it’s over with, I’ll produce something. I keep reading bits and pieces about writing – Kingsolver’s thoughts as she selects short stories for a collection, Dwight Swain as he plows some of the same ground Sam does as he gears one up with insights on writing that sells. So while I’m indulging in clever avoidances, at least I’m off target.

                        I’ve thought that I liked Barbara Kingsolver’s writing, though when I read it again closely I can’t get into the heads of her characters. I’m entertained, and her spirit is humorous even when I don’t get the jokes. Now I see that her writing doesn’t move all that quickly, but it stacked with auxiliary facts. She thinks we’re learning all the time and that validity of the surrounding facts is paramount. Some kind of scientist in her real life though, she gets pissed off with writing that stretches facts around the edges. Man, I was hoping to take some liberties since always having to learn everything about the worlds one crams into paragraphs is a huge job. Now, how in heaven’s name will I ever be able to produce vivid 18th century Virginians captured as kids by Indians and spending decades leading war parties against Swiss Brethren farmers and negotiating treaties for tribes, collecting multiple wives and providing little Stookeys for the Shawnee Trail of Tears?

                        Maybe I’ll do some memoir work even if nobody would be interested. I hauled out some grainy old 8 millimeter movies of the Imans and Jardines and the Braun kids hopping on the gravel beach at Camano. Mainly they were running back and forth across the rocky beach from the green dinghy to the horseshoe pits and banging wood balls with croquet sticks. They were running around with shirts flapping in the air like capes echoing Superman. There was lots of flicker there to set a mood, but I couldn’t begin to imagine a story that would go anyplace.

                        I browsed a neat little model of writing called the Snowflake method from an online website. The approach is pretty mechanical. You’re supposed to start well and keep moving, with cycles of mini-scenes culminating after much uphill progress in some sort of peak before one descends into relief. I don’t seem to make headway sitting back to come up with plot lines. Probably one does need a sense of where things will be going when they sit down to write, but I can’t really feel how this works. I do get fragments, and sometimes they spark into something said or seen. I just wonder if I can build a vision of some character to trust and want to speak through -- and let them work through some sort of encounter. Will I be able to switch voices and produce interactions?

                        All my life I think I’ve done narrations and don’t know how to show thing happening without telling them. Getting out of being too linear seems to be part of the trick. At least that’s what the snowflake guy has me thinking. It’s not what he says precisely, but it’s what I think when I try to argue with his mechanical ideas. And he put me onto Dwight Swain’s “Techniques of the Selling Writer” -- which is itself an incredibly well written and visual piece of writing. Swain is full of paradoxes in the processes he tries to lay out - and the circles, while they leave me feeling a little dizzy, leave the impression of making tad bits of progress in understanding.

                        I think about you often, wondering how you’re doing with your writing. It’s so much fun that you’re writing that memoir of Kurgan ancestors of the steppe -- piloting those old horse herding bones down the hill in the evolution of their paternalistic and militaristic culture from hardly anything to the roots of what’s still abundantly around. I wonder if you’re able to keep yourself stuck to the chair, or finding some pattern as you run migrate the other room for a while and loosen up the soul with hammering on that baby grand. Likely you’re out and around walking the streets of Taipei enjoying the Year of Whatever in your circumstance more stable than the shaking going on to the north.

                        I don’t know what I’ll say tonight, but I think I’ll tell Sam that it’s probably not going to be a mystery that I’ll write.