teaching writing

“…I was but the learner.  Now, I am the master.”

–Darth Vader

I spent last week as the writer-in-resident/guest instructor at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, the same workshop I attended as a student 11 years ago now.  Talk about full circle.

When I was preparing for this gig, I thought about the writers who’d been the guest instructors when I was a student at Odyssey — Patricia McKillip, John Crowley, James Morrow, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Harlan Ellison.  Not only had they all been established authors for years and years — nay, decades.  They’d been teaching writing for that long.  They had established and well-practiced lectures, exercises, and techniques.

I couldn’t do that.  I just don’t have the experience.  So my plan was to rant about my experiences and the advice and discoveries that had helped me, and turn the lectures into discussions, asking lots of questions and seeing what happened.  It seemed to work.  And I discovered that while I don’t have loads of experience, I have memory:  I’m new enough to all this that I remember very well what it’s like to struggle to get published, to struggle with plot and pacing, to just, you know, struggle.  That’s recent history for me.  I remember very clearly the day in December 2003 when called my Mom and told her I was going to quit because I just couldn’t do this any more.  I don’t have so much experience and miles under my belt that my years as a newbie are distant memory.  That memory is something I think instructors with decades of experience no longer have.

I hope I never forget what it was like to be new.

My lecture topics at Odyssey:

• Monday:  Novels v. short stories.  Manipulating story length and why you want to.
• Tuesday:  Suspense, pacing, and the release of information.
• Wednesday:  Plot, action, and character, and how they work together.
• Thursday:  Revising, and taking a stand in your fiction.
• Friday:  The Business and its Psychology.