I started a writing class yesterday. (Just one in a series of self-improvement-y things I’m doing now, including but not limited to career counseling, piano lessons, and learning to dig people out of avalanches).

Writing classes have always inspired me in times of need. Back in 1996, when I was first emerging from Phase I of spoiled upper-middle-class white girl adulthood – that is, getting jobs I actually liked, earning money instead of borrowing from Dad, finally adjusting to the idea that I had to support myself etc etc –I took a fiction-writing class at the University of Washington.

The stuff I wrote wasn’t really good, per se (although it had its moments) but I learned lots of stuff, the most important being, my imagination actually still worked. (Those of who you’ve read my novel have heard me yak on about this discovery phase ad nauseum so you can skip the part of this entry where I talk about Oprah.) That class also got me writing in a semi-regular way.

Flash-forward to ten years and twenty boyfriends later. I look much the same, although thinner, with more gray hair (artfully colored over), and am now a glamorous published novelist struggling with her second book — sure to be the breakout novel!–and, as usual, decide to take a writing class to help me get over the hump. This one is called “Reading for Novelists,” and we are basically supposed to find our favorite authors and imitate them. Or rather, study their craft, and figure out what they’re doing that makes their writing so good, then do it ourselves.

But never mind about that for now. Last night the teacher (the talented Waverly Fitzgerald) said writers were usually divided into two camps: one who seek a plot for their characters and those who seek characters for their plot. (Traditionally, the former is considered the more “literary” and less formulaic way to write). During this last month or so in which I’ve gotten 1)all fired up about my latest novel idea then 2)deflated about my latest novel idea, I thought all along that I was being so character-driven, that what I had was a bunch of characters that I was trying to find a plot for. What I realized today was that this is true for the minor characters. In fact, it was in imagining those minor characters (i.e. the World of Warcraft playing geek who lives in his mother’s basement) that got me excited about this book.

HOWEVER. The protagonist is totally unclear to me, and that, I realize is because she is just a vehicle of the plot. That’s why I can’t figure out who the hell she is: I came up with this plot first and now I have to create this character for it. HMM. So should I throw away my rather appealing plot and instead try to find an appealing character? Or keep on bashing around for a character who will serve my plot?

Yawn. I know it’s boring when writers go on and on about their characters and their “struggles” with them. So I’ll shut up. You don’t care. You just wanna see the next damn book. (Or hear about who I’m making out with or which unpleasant ex-fling sighting I had yesterday, during which we pretended not to see each other though we totally did. OK fine, the Construction Worker).

Oh. And Oprah hasn’t f*cking called yet.

xo
Rebecca