An Experiment in Scotch

That’s all I need. Regard­less, I’ve signed up for an online fic­tion writ­ing class that started today. I’ve been toy­ing with the idea for quite awhile and finally took the plunge. I’m not exactly sure what I plan to get out of it other than an impe­tus for reg­u­larly writ­ing “some­thing”. I’ve dis­cov­ered that my new Word­Press theme encour­ages me to write longer, more thought out posts which in my world trans­lates to “not writ­ing at all.” I’m hop­ing the class helps with my writ­ing dis­ci­pline. If I get undis­ci­plined, I hope it spanks me.

But apart from that, I’m really hop­ing to under­stand a lit­tle bet­ter how the fic­tion form works, how it’s cre­ated and built. I don’t typ­i­cally have trou­ble spew­ing off 500 words about almost any­thing but my tal­ent for mak­ing sto­ries up seems to have ceased about the time I got out of junior high. I’ve tried writ­ing a lit­tle fic­tion here and there but the results have been so poor (and by results I mean “thrown before the high throne of my inter­nal self-critic only to be sum­mar­ily exe­cuted by fin­ger­nail pulling”) that I haven’t really tried to improve them much. But I know that I can write fic­tion, it’s just a mat­ter of dis­cov­er­ing how again and that’s really why I’m in the class.

I recently ran across Mal­colm Gladwell’s piece on late bloomers and that was the cat­a­lyst for actu­ally sign­ing up for the class. I’d like to be a writer, at least in the sense of the word that means “I can sell enough of my work to enough peo­ple who actu­ally like it to pay my bills”. With goals that low, I don’t see how I can’t suc­ceed. More seri­ously, I think I have a mod­icum of tal­ent for the craft, fleet­ingly dis­played though it may be, and I’d like to fos­ter that tal­ent. I’m hop­ing that with a lit­tle instruc­tion, maybe I can fig­ure out what the hell I’m doing with all these words that keep pop­ping out of my head.

I’ll prob­a­bly blog semi-randomly about the expe­ri­ence for those of you scor­ing along at home.