What Now?

On having something to say; a Thanksgiving post of sorts

After my whiny post of yesterday, I did some serious moping around, and then got a little less grumpy, and finally calmed down enough to get some perspective.

First of all, NaNoWriMo was supposed to be a lark; why on earth was I making such a big deal about it? So my novel sucks; what of it? I've learned some stuff about fiction-writing, I've written a number of words that I'd be impressed with in any other month, and I've had some fun as well as some distress. Let's call it a success and move on. (Justine Larbalestier has a great post on exactly this point today.)

Here's a potentially productive line of thinking from yesterday: It occrured to me that, in all of my thinking about this novel and other potential novels, what interests me is a particular cultural moment; that's why all of the ideas I've had have been historical fiction. But I never have a particular STORY I want to tell; I just have cool STUFF that I want to share with other people -- how people dressed, what they ate, what ideas they had, how they interacted with other folks. Really, these interesting things bring out the teacher in me rather than the storyteller in me; or at least, if I actually have any storyteller in me, she is always a servant of the teacher in me. And historical fiction is a great way to communicate those cool things and teach readers about interesting moments from the past, but it's not the only way. Popular nonfiction is another way to communicate such cool things and is a genre I've long been interested in possibly writing some day. So maybe the next time I think of a cool topic that I'd like to explore, maybe I could think in terms of nonfiction rather than fiction.

Now, admittedly, such a decision is giving up a dream of mine, one that I've long held, the dream that some day, after I was tenured, i would spend my summers in a mountain cabin somewhere writing genre fiction.

But you know what? That dream wasn't ever very realistic, since it turns out that a mountain cabin is about the worst place I could possibly go to write. Long stretches of unstructured time without social interaction is a terrible combination for me, leading to sluggishness and self-pity. So this very specific picture I had of WN, Novelist, was really just a pretty little fantasy but not in line with the person I really am. So maybe I can create some new dreams that have a lot more to do with my reality. Not that I'm ditching for ever and ever the idea of writing a novel, but I'm giving myself a bit of a break here.

Then my brain started churning again: Okay, if I'm going to write nonfiction, I need to think of a new topic Right Now! I must have something I'm working on! I actually stewed about this for a couple of hours, feeling almost frantic as my mind skittered around from topic to topic, until I caught myself and realized what I was doing. Oh right, I remember that frantic feeling; it's the one about needing to come up with a good dissertation topic! Except, um, I already wrote a dissertation and never need to do that again. Indeed, even if I never write anything again, I've got my degree, my job is in no jeopardy, and there is no "publish or perish" in this world of mine. So chill already, WN.

By the time I woke up this morning, I had realized that I'd been putting wanting to write ahead of having something to say, which is very much putting the cart before the horse. So I made three resolutions this morning:

• I will recognize that my true passion in life is teaching rather than writing; I would be deeply unhappy without the first but often live just fine without the latter. So I resolve to think of myself as "a teacher who sometimes writes," which means that when I'm not writing, it's just not one of those times. No big deal, and it needn't affect my sense of self (which is what was happening this past week or so, when apparently I was thinking of myself as "a writer whose day job is teaching").

• When I have something to say, I'll say it, but I won't put pressure on myself to find things to say. And I won't decide on genre or word length or any of the rest of these details before I decide what I want to say and how best to say it.

• I will let myself read and study the things I'm interested in without putting pressure on myself to write something about them. It's okay to learn just for the sake of learning; life is not a graduate seminar in which I need to produce a paper to justify all of the interesting reading and talking I did. E.g., last summer I was all set to give myself a couple of months of reveling in Victoriana without needing to write anything at all, but I panicked a little about that and wound up giving myself a writing project after all. And since I'm an Americanist by training and had decided that writing was the end-game, that meant I dropped my Victorian project altogether.

And having firmly decided on those three resolutions (which I should print out and post somewhere, i realize), I graded five exams and then lay down on the couch to read a book on pedagogy I've had for months now but had bogged down in the first chapter of: Robert L. Fried's The Passionate Teacher. Once again, I found the opening chapter tedious, but it gets better as it goes along, and as I read, I had a few ideas about things I want to do in my classes -- not actually suggestions from Fried, but simply reading about pedagogy was cranking up that part of my brain.

And then I started thinking about an assignment that I like to give, one that can be modified in various ways to serve a variety of functions. And then I remembered that a colleague of mine had said to me not two weeks ago what a great assignment that was, and we talked about how she could use it in her course. And it occurred to me that this assignment is something that I cooked up a couple of years ago, in my first year of high school teaching, and that I was actually proud of how well it had worked in a variety of contexts with students of different levels. It's not brilliant or anything, but I guess it's not something that  everyone does, and it occurred to me that it was an assignment that I'd be happy to share with other folks.

So this morning I wrote for an hour and a half or so and wrote 1300 words of a draft for a pedagogy article that I'm now planning on submitting to English Journal, the journal that had the privilege of publishing my very first article written as a high school teacher. The nice thing about an EJ article is that it should be 3,750 words or fewer, so I'm a third of the way there just in my initial writing today. There's a relevant call for manuscripts for a special issue of the journal with a deadline of Jan. 15, which feels very do-able. I wrote my first article for EJ in about a month, it was accepted maybe three months later (peer review and all!), and it was then published within six months of acceptance -- from my original idea to publication in just under a year. It was a revelation and actually kept me from getting sick and tired of the subject, which is what has happened with every other article I've ever written.

And this experience of this morning is how my NaNoWriMo whiny-ness of yesterday has become my Thanksgiving post of today; I'm grateful for the opportunity to remind myself about what I really care about, for the leisure to figure out what I want to say, and for the craft to say what's on my mind. Not too shabby, really.

A happy Thanksgiving to us all!

Nice people doing nothing

Last night I was doing some brainstorming for my novel, which is once again at a total standstill (indeed, it has pretty much been in that state from its inception), and I suddenly had an epiphany about its major flaw that was causing me so many lack-of-plot headaches:

I am conflict-avoidant, on the page as perhaps (to a lesser extent) in real life. I've set up a fictional world in which all of the characters are basically good, decent people, leading normal sorts of lives, with nothing particularly dramatic happening. And that would probably be a good sort of life to lead, but it doesn't make for interesting fiction.

D. and I have a long-standing joke about my response to many films and TV shows. I hate a plot that is premised on a stupid lie or needlessly poor communication skills or other types of incompetence -- one reason that I find most sitcoms difficult to watch -- and I will often turn to D mid-viewing and say, "You know how this conflict could have been avoided? If she had just clarified that mistake early on (or if he had just done his job well, etc.), none of these other things would have happened." And D. always laughs and points out that, while my argument is no doubt true, it would also make for boring television shows that would actually never see the light of day because no viewers would bother tuning in for a show in which nothing interesting ever happens.

The other, related problem I'm having goes back to my "good, decent people" line above. I've set the novel in a 19th-century community that was in many ways closed off from the rest of society -- er, let's go ahead and call it Utopia, since it was formed by some folks attempting to create an ideal society -- and while, of course, nothing is ever perfect and this Utopia had as many problems as other 19th-century communities, I'm trying to honor their idealism and their attempts to do what is right. So basically all of my characters are good people, and I'm reluctant to make anything bad happen to them. I've read novels set in this Utopia before, and what the authors usually do is create snake-in-the-grass characters and/or huge scandals (usually sex scandals, but also sometimes financial scandals) in which the members of the community undermine all of the community values, but I always find such novels cheap jabs at what this community really did try to do, even though they fell short (as do we all).

I even tried to bring in an outside character, someone who joins the community for ostensibly pure reasons but has a secret. But damn if she didn't turn out to be a good person as well who was trying to write a sympathetic portrayal of the Utopian community and wanted to see it from the inside. So that storyline petered out almost right away -- another good person doing a good thing.

I'm so bored that I can't stand it, and yet I can't seem to make anything horrible happen in the novel either.

Now, a story of good people all trying to do their best in the face of some difficult situation can certainly be the stuff of good fiction, but I'm not sure I have the skill or emotional wherewithal to handle it. I once heard it said (I wish I could remember where) that the trick to good fiction is to create likable characters and then do terrible things to them, but that seems like a terribly draining thing to do. I think one of the reasons that I wanted to write a young adult novel -- and not a "problem" YA novel -- is that I didn't want to spend time in the muck of all that can be horrible in life. D. points out to me that Wind in the Willows is one of my favorite books, and not much actually happens there, and there is little "muck." But I'm no Kenneth Grahame. Nor am I an L. M. Montgomery who is capable of writing charming, funny stories about likable characters; I've tried, I really have, but I just can't think of anything that the characters can do that isn't terrible, and I don't want to do the terrible things.

I wanted to write as an escape in the way that I also like to read as an escape, but I'm not sure that actually works.

I think I should have started my novel-writing attempts with an out-and-out melodrama, with bad guys who act as they do strictly out of badness -- we're talking mustache-twirling villains who tie damsels to train tracks just to be mean. That might have made my life easier.

Unfortunately, I've been trying to think of melodramatic plots since last night when all of this first occurred to me, and I can't think of anything that isn't the plot of a novel someone else has already written.

Sigh. I'm finding NaNoWriMo very depressing, I have to say. After 25 days of this, I have an increasing conviction that I am formidably uncreative. I can't decide whether just washing my hands of the whole business would be more or less depressing than trying to limp along.

Hmmm

I just wrote a sex scene for my NaNoWriMo novel.

For my Young Adult novel. That seems wrong, doesn't it?

Did I mention, a lesbian sex scene?

It wasn't exactly a real sex scene. It was more like that "So this is marriage," bee-in-the-pear-blossom scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Or one of those early casting-a-spell scenes between Willow and Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, scenes that were clearly sexual rather than sex.

Totally NOT a scene that I would actually include in a young adult novel; much more like a scene that a reader steeped in Boston marriages or Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "The Female World of Love and Ritual" might find hot. So probably not a winner of a scene all the way around, and certainly not one that I'd planned even earlier today.

But somehow this is the idea I had for my characters this evening. And, given that I'm completely at a loss when it comes to plots, I'm happy to seize on any idea that comes to me about what my characters might do -- even, apparently, have an erotic moment together. You see what desperation over plot will do to an amateur author?

I'm low Protestant enough (despite that Episcopalian conversion that sits uneasily on the surface) that I'm both turned on and deeply ashamed of myself for having written this scene.

I've actually already written both the first and the last chapters of the novel, and it's everything in between that's causing me problems. I haven't had in mind so much a story arc as a story destination, and I still can't decide how to get my characters from Point A to Point B. But this erotic scene actually works in that trajectory, so I'll leave it for now, even though it very much changes the tenor of the novel. But hey, it's an apprenticeship novel, so it will never see the light of day anyway, right?

I have, however, made the clear decision that, if I ever actually do publish a novel and it has erotic scenes in it, I'm totally publishing under a nom de plume, because I couldn't handle my students (and their parents!) connecting such a scene with their high school English teacher.

So important to have gotten those important decisions out of the way, don't you think?

NaNoWriMo update

So, perhaps you've been wondering how I'm doing with my NaNoWriMo novel.

Eh, not so hot, actually, I'm sorry to say.

I'm a big believer in writing fast, I really am, but maybe not quite this fast. I knew when I started this that 50,000 words in November would be pretty much beyond the pale, and I'd set my sights lower, at 30,000 words, but even that is not going to happen, I think, since I'm less of a third of the way there with only one week remaining in the month. I'm trying not to get too distressed about that and, in a schadenfreude sort of way, comfort myself with the fact that the colleague who convinced me to sign up for NaNoWriMo then dropped out on the second day of the month. He told me the same thing that I'd told him last summer, which is that it was crazy even to contemplate doing NaNoWriMo when our trimester ends in late November, what with all of the exams and the comment-writing that has to happen. He now wants us to do our own writing program in December, so perhaps that's when I'll reach my goal.

So here's what's been good about NaNoWriMo: I've already written more in three weeks than I did on my mystery all last summer! And I've realized that I'm definitely not a planning sort of writer; I was never an outliner when writing academic stuff, so I guess it's not so weird that I'm not an outliner at fiction either. And I've found it kind of freeing just to write without much plan; in grasping for material off the cuff, I've come up with a couple of things that I think will work well as motifs throughout the novel, things I don't think I'd have come up with if I'd sat down to plan everything out. And I've had some fun along the way -- not consistently, but often enough that it's been okay.

Here's what's been not so hot: I'm one of those folks who sometimes retreats under pressure, and I've found the NaNoWriMo emphasis on wordcounts to be counterproductive sometimes. I'm sure it works well for some folks, but as I fall further and further "behind" the NaNoWriMo daily goals, I'm increasingly inclined to hide in bed with my head under the pillow rather than write, since I can't possibly catch up now. So today I had to go back to my fail-safe system of lowering my productivity standards drastically; I decided that all I had to do is write 500 words a day, and that this would count as successful. The approach that Chris Bray (founder of NaNoWriMo) argues for is lowering one's standards for the quality of the work, and I'm all for that -- I'm a big believer in Anne Lamott's "shitty first draft"! -- but I can't follow his advice for what to do when the wordcount is coming up short: kill someone off! throw in a tornado! have aliens attack! That might give me more words, but since I'm pretty sure I don't want to write a novel in which aliens attack during a tornado, it seems like that would be a lot of work for words I know I don't want. So I'm lowering my standards for wordcount instead.

Here's the bigger problem, and it may be an insurmountable one: I'm just not sure I've got the chops to be a fiction writer. I can think of characters, but I seem unable to make them DO anything. This has always been my problem. When D. and I tell each other bedtime stories (one of our rituals that I love), I can create characters and name them and give them occupations and all the rest, but then I'm tapped out. Now, this works out just fine for bedtime stories, the point of which is to be only mildly interesting at best so that one's audience falls asleep quickly, but it's not such a great sign for a novelist.

Maybe this plot failure is simply failure of nerve, failure to step out boldly and, damnit, make something happen! Or maybe it means I'm just not creative in that particular way. Hard to say at this point.

HipWriterMama did an online interview today with young adult author Robin LaFevers (who has a great website in which she blogs about her writing process), and the interview included these comforting words:

HWM: What advice would you give to all those NaNoWriMo writers out there?

R. L. LaFevers: Don’t stress. It’s only a game to get you really focused, nothing more that that. Simply by doing NaNo you’ve proved that you are committed to this idea of writing, that you are compelled to put words to paper. Enjoy it. By the same token, if doing NaNo doesn’t work for you, or your work from it is unusable, don’t despair. That might just mean that slamming through a quick and dirty first draft isn’t YOUR process. Lots of writers shudder at that approach, so it just means you’re one of them and not one of those who thrives on that. But don’t walk away! Continue to experiment with all sorts of different approaches and processes. You never know when you’ll find one that sticks.

Also? Nothing is wasted. Not even stuff that appears to be pure dreck. It’s important to know what doesn’t work so we can get that much closer to what does.

So I'm taking her advice and considering this a useful experiment, one that maybe I'll continue into December with my colleague. And I'll treat it as a game to get me focused, and I'll wait for awhile to decide that I'm actually "committed to this idea of writing." We shall see.

Further thoughts

Thank you for your supportive comments to my last post. After I blogged about it and blew off some initial steam, I went over to the dining hall for dinner and ran into one of the colleagues who teaches in the program that's essentially the "Empowering Young Women and Helping Them to Make Smart Decisions in Their Lives" series of courses. So I told her about my conversation with my colleague, naming no names, and she told me that in the senior year of this course, they do a unit on sexual violence and bring in people from a rape crisis center. So I'm feeling a bit of a relief at this reinforcement of what we at FGS do stand for, despite my misogyny-masquerading-as-sensitivity (MMAS) colleague.

I also told the story to a sympathetic colleague today, and she had an interesting perspective. My conversation with MMAS yesterday began when he wanted to talk about an incident from earlier in the week, when he had completely dropped the ball for the second time in as many weeks on a responsibility for a program that I run. I stopped by his room to say something about it, and he immediately apologized for having blown off what he was supposed to do. But then yesterday he stopped by to say that he'd felt I was yelling at him and that he'd been really angry. I actually knew this already since he'd bitched not-quite-publicly about my "yelling" at him, so I'd been waiting for him to say something. Let me hasten to add that I hadn't yelled at all; he was just clearly really embarrassed at having been called on his irresponsibility.

So, as my sympathetic colleague pointed out -- correctly, I think -- that MMAS had perhaps brought up the whole rape-is-worse-than-death thing as a way to find some common ground with me, and then my response showed him that he'd blown it yet again, and that's perhaps why he just shrugged in a "What can I say?" sort of way instead of responding to the substance of my comments. So her advice, and I think it's good advice, is to let things lie for a week or two; given that we're heading into exams week and then the Thanksgiving break, it's not as though he's going to be doing any more damage in the next couple of weeks. And then, once we're into December and the fall term is over and everyone's emotions have settled down, I can return to the topic again. And my sympathetic colleague thinks that, under those circumstances, he may well voice different opinions if his ego isn't engaged in certain ways. This seems like excellent advice, and I think I'll follow it.

In retrospect, I've been interested in my visceral reaction against MMAS's teaching something that I find so antithetical to FGS's mission and ethos ... and I had a moment of empathy about how some folks at St. Martyr's had visceral reactions against me, viewing my mere presence as antithetical to St. Martyr's mission and ethos. Of course, there were multiple versions of that mission competing at the school, and I was antithetical to only one of them and not the one under which I was hired, whereas FGS has a much more unified vision of itself as a school. But still, it was interesting that one of my early responses to MMAS was to think "If that's what he thinks, he shouldn't be teaching here!" I calmed down, of course, but it was an interesting moment of walking in someone else's shoes, even if I think that other person is unreasonable. Interesting.

And now, thank goodness, it's Friday night, and I'm committed to not worrying about FGS stuff over the weekend ... well, other than grading my student's in-class essays and planning the exams for my courses. But other than that, I'm working on my NaNoWriMo novel and puttering around the house with D. I need such a weekend after this week!

Thanks again, everyone, for the supportive comments yesterday.

Misogyny masquerading as sensitivity

I'm boiling mad right now, the result of a conversation I just had with a male colleague, someone I normally like and find an agreeable fellow teacher. What began as a perfectly respectable conversation about teaching Mary Rowlandson's Indian captivity narrative took a nasty turn:

"It's really interesting to teach this book in a girls' school," he said. "I ask them, 'What's even worse than death?'"

I answered, "Being tortured and then killed?"

Surprised at my apparently missing the point, he answered -- in that quiet sort of voice that people use when mentioning something unpleasant, like cancer -- "Rape."

"Really, you tell your students that rape is worse than death?" I asked.

"Well, yes, because you have to live with it for the rest of your life."

I have heard this line over the years from more than one male acquaintance who thinks he's being sensitive to women's plight, so I asked what is usually a convincing clincher in an argument: "Do you know how many women are raped? Do you really think it would be better if all of them were dead?"

Normally this elicits a shocked "No, that's not what I meant," followed by back-peddling, and we can then talk about the "dead purity before defilement" line of thinking, but not this time. He didn't actually say "yes," but he shrugged and made a "What can I say?" face.

He was on his way out the door by this point, so my parting comment was, "Please go ask all of the many women of your acquaintance who have no doubt been raped if they all wish they were dead right now. I can guarantee what most of their answers will be."

He made one of those "Well, I guess this is just our opinions" sort of comments as he backed right out of my classroom, leaving me to get madder and madder until I was shaking. Not about his opinion, particularly -- he's welcome to be a misogynist asshole if he likes -- but at the fact that he's apparently teaching his students that women's purity is more important than their life. And damn it, those are MY students too, and nobody should be laying that crap on them!

I'm so furious on behalf of my students that I feel it incumbent upon me to do something, but I don't actually know what to do, and clearly I should get my blood pressure back to normal and my head cleared before I act. Blogging it is the first step toward calming down and thinking rationally and deciding what to do about this. Suggestions are most welcome.

NaNoWriMo, Day 7

NaNoWriMo began last Sunday, on Nov. 1 – what a lovely calendrical turn of events, getting one’s start on a weekend and having the whole day to get well and truly launched!

Except that D and I were painting window trim that morning. And I also had a set of papers to grade. I had had the crazy notion in the week before that I would get everything done in October, somehow clear the decks so that I could concentrate on my novel and little else during the month of November. Yeah, right. It finally sank in the Thursday before NaNoWriMo began that I couldn’t possibly grade five sets of essays in the couple of days before the novel-writing month got started, and that I would have to tackle my writing on top of rather than instead of everything else. I’d known this beforehand, of course, but then had forgotten it in the rush of anticipation right before the starting line.

But, despite the painting and grading, I managed to get a good if not great start to the month by writing 1136 words that day: 2% of the way to 50,000 words! I was particularly impressed with myself since it became clear the moment that I sat down to write that I had done very little planning ahead of time. The night before it had occurred to me that I should name my characters, and I already had a setting chosen, but I hadn’t decided when the story took place and hadn’t thought much about plot at all. So that 1136 words doesn’t include some last-minute planning that had to happen before I could even get started. One needs to write 1667 words a day to maintain a steady pace, but I wasn’t even going to try for that, assuming that I’d do most of my writings on the weekends and especially over Thanksgiving week, which I mostly have off of school. (Yes, I need to be grading final exams and writing up end-of-term comments for all students that same week; I’m steadfastly not thinking about that right now.)

And then my word-count remained unchanged for the next five days as I struggled to get through one of those exhausting weeks that one isn’t entirely sure one will survive. I was getting up at 5:00 or 5:30 every morning to grade, and then the days were taken up with what felt like endless demands; classes themselves went fine, but nothing else seemed to go smoothly the whole darned week. I admitted to myself on Monday that writing was just not going to happen during the school week.

I had thought I might try to get 500 or so words under my belt when I staggered home on Friday, but instead I listened to D’s words of wisdom when she asked, “Why don’t you take a nap?” No writing but much sleep was had, and this was a Good Thing.

Plus, I know this morning was going to be ideal for jumping back into my novel. Say hello to the SATs! Yes, this instrument of torture for adolescents is the single best method of enforced discipline I know of. (I hasten to point out to my non-high-school-teacher readers that proctoring the SATs is not a required part of my job; it’s something I signed up for so that I could get paid while forcing myself to get caught up with my regular job, so I consider it a win-win other than the having to wake up early on a Saturday.)

But this morning, instead of my usual SAT grading marathon, I did an SAT novel-writing marathon. As the students labored away, filling in little circles with their number-two pencils, I labored away, writing 2173 words (plus drafting this blog entry) in the three hours of forced work time. Okay, I know that 2,173 words does not exactly constitute a "marathon," but still, it's not bad. I’m hoping to get in a couple shorter writing sessions today and then a couple more tomorrow as well, plus spending time with D since I had little time for her (or anyone or anything else) this past week.

I have some things to say about what I’m learning about myself as  novelist, how my process is going, etc., but I’ve just realized that I’m using valuable writing time in blogging rather than novel-writing. Oops! Must get back to it, and must treat blogging as only a quick break from other writing.

Bullets of "back to the blog"

• The next time I have the bright idea to teach an overload while also running a self-study committee (for the school's reaccreditation process), I'll run it past you all first, and you can dissuade me.
• Fortunately, the self-study work is over next week, and the overload is over in mid-December. Then regular life will resume, and I bet that it will seem much more relaxing (at least for awhile) than regular life normally does.
• Plus, the money from said overload has gone to replacing six of our windows. You know, with the kind of windows that don't let cold gales run through them. So that will be a welcome improvement this winter.
• But that means that D and I have been doing things like painting window trim in the same week that I've graded papers from every single one of my students. Again, I'll check with you all first before making such arrangements in the future.
• My mom is getting D and me glass doors for our fireplace for Christmas, yet another sign that winter is right around the corner. What we'd love to do in the next few years is to get a wooden stove insert for the fireplace, but who knows when we'll have the money to do that, and the glass doors and their surround will spruce the place up in the meantime, as well as providing the necessary smoke barrier required for our tiny fireplace. Last year we wound up tacking up a strip of aluminum foil at the top of the fireplace opening, which was effective but not beautiful. The doors will be a distinct improvement.
• There are several blog posts I want to write now that I'm not grading and painting all the damn time, and I shall get to those soon, but now I must go have dinner with my sadly neglected honey and then go to bed early, since I have SATs tomorrow. Proctoring SATs is actually a great thing to do; the hourly rate of pay is not so much, but it's the principle of getting paid for a period of enforced discipline that I love. Tomorrow I'm doing extended-time testing for the SAT subject tests, which means that I'll have a few hours in which I absolutely have to sit in a quiet room while kids are busily working, which is a great chance to catch up on all of the non-papers grading I've been ignoring for the past week. Last time I did SAT proctoring, I got all of the essays for my freshman finals graded in only a couple of hours, something it would have taken me much longer to do normally. Plus, apparently I'll seize any opportunity to read aloud, even if it's as un-beautiful prose as SAT directions.

The next noveling adventure

So, you know how I was trying to write a murder mystery this summer? And how the work was interesting but painfully slow because it felt as though I were writing in a foreign language? And how I then abandoned the project, at least for now, because the trial made murder not so much fun (if you see what I mean) and because school was starting anyway? And besides, I was less and less confident that I could really do it anyway.

Well, I'm going to try the whole writing-a-novel game again, but this time, I'm taking an entirely different approach. NaNoWriMo, here I come! Yes, I'm going to attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November, buoyed by all the other folks around the internet who are attempting the same thing. It's crazy, no doubt about it, but somehow the sheer craziness is part of the appeal.

I'm going to write a young adult novel, a historical novel set in a location pretty near here that my mom and I actually visited when she was up here a couple of weeks ago, which is when I started cooking up this idea. I have only the vaguest ideas about characters and plot, but I'm trying not to worry about that fact but rather to embrace it as part of the adventure. The theory behind writing so much so quickly is that one wears out one's inner critic so that the words come flowing out -- lots of junk, sure, but probably something salvageable as well. I rely on this same theory all the time when doing brainstorming exercises with my students, so why not try it myself, instead of the painfully slow writing I was doing this summer? Especially since I've always been a writer who figures out what I want to say only after I've said it.

A colleague had suggested this summer that we do NaNoWriMo together this year. I, of course, pointed out to him all the reasons that this was a foolish idea, not least of which is that we're on the trimester system, so our fall term ends in late November. Who ever heard of grading exams and writing comments while also trying to write a novel? Absolute nonsense!

And yeah, it probably is nonsense, but we've decided to dive in anyway. Recognizing that this is actually a busy month for us, we're promising ourselves that we don't have to do the entire 50,000 words and will call it a success if we get even half that much written. So it's not actually so unreasonable a goal, really.

In the meantime, I'm clearing the decks a little bit to prepare myself: straightening up the study so that it's a more pleasant place to work, doing as much class prep ahead of time as I can, and most importantly taking a hiatus -- perhaps permanent? -- from some online academic writing coaching I've been doing, which was something I needed to get out of simply because I was burning out on it. This feels like the equivalent of cleaning out closets, getting rid of the junk and creating space in my life for things that add rather than detract from my happiness.

So I'm equal parts excited and nervous, which isn't a bad way to start a new adventure!

Parents' Weekend

Even though it's Sunday, it's really only Saturday for me since this was Parents' Weekend, i.e., the time of the 13-hour Friday and of going to work on Saturday. I know I said a couple of weeks ago that I'd turned the corner on the academic year and that everything was going to be hunky-dory, and that was totally true, but I also knew that the past two weeks were going to be seriously intense. But, having gotten through Parents' Weekend, I really and truly have now passed the fall milestone.

Thank goodness for a colleague of mine, who many years ago got the administration to make the Monday following Parents' Weekend a holiday; she couldn't argue for it on the grounds that the faculty were wiped out, which would have fallen on deaf ears in that particular administration, so she resorted to the plea of "Won't someone think of the children? They're so tired from Parents' Weekend!" I'm sure it is tiring for the kids to have their parents in tow, and certainly they are stressed by having their parents get their midterm academic reports, but it is the faculty who are all zombies at this point. I crawled home yesterday afternoon and collapsed in a hard nap on the couch, and I'm anticipating that my zombie brain won't go away until maybe tomorrow.

Fortunately, FGS does not do what many schools do, which is to have each faculty member have a 10-minute meeting with the parents of each student. Can you even imagine?! I have 60 students! No, we're much more sensible and efficient here. Each faculty member and administrator has 5-8 advisees; the advisors get a midterm report from each of the teachers for those 5-8 kids, and then we have 30-45-minute conversations with the parents of those 5-8 kids, talking about their academic progress and anything else pertinent. It works well to step back and look at the overall patterns in all of the student's classes, which doesn't happen in the traditional 10-minutes-a-student method, and we can also talk about how happy or not the student seems, how sports and music lessons and all the rest are fitting in, etc. The conversations are stimulating and fairly satisfying, but I'm tired afterward, especially since I also taught five classes yesterday to rooms packed with parents as well as students; we're in cheerleading performer mode for most of the day and then in caring counselor mode during the advisee conversations, and it wears a body out.

These are privileged kids, no doubt about it, and I sometimes feel guilty that I have such a cushy job, being paid well to teach well-prepared, respectful kids in a beautiful setting. (In fact, the only way that I've made my peace with it is to think of it as cosmic recompense for the five years of suffering at St. Martyr's. And if I may indulge in a moment of snarkiness, I'd like to point out that Parents' Weekend at St. Martyr's used to be the time of greatest alcohol problems and vandalism on campus, since so many parents brought in alcohol for their kids. Nor did they ever usually to visit their children's classes, even though this was always the invitation. So despite what I'm about to say, I wouldn't trade FGS for my old life for the world!)

But it's also true that even privileged kids have their problems, and this week's meetings gave me new background for the kid whose parents have had such a nasty divorce that they couldn't stop bickering and back-biting even in front of me, and the kid who has anorexia and pretty profound learning issues. I also got hints of a possible bullying situation that needs serious attention; fortunately, I'll be part of a team in addressing this. And most of the kids, regardless of other issues, have parents who are so driven by particular ideas about success that I have a new appreciation for the pressure-cooker that is home.

I spend my time with students alternating between pushing them to think even though it is really hard work and encouraging them to stop and take a breath and realize that life is going to be okay regardless of this grade or that leadership position; I try to shake them up and calm them down simultaneously. And  I'm well suited for this particular combination of mentoring roles; it's one of the important things I do in my job, I think. And Parents' Weekend highlights for me the necessity of that second type of work, of trying to carve out space for students to think about how they might define achievement and success apart from their parents' expectations.

All very interesting. And damn, I'm tired!