Writer's Wednesday: Teaching

It's time for this writer to check in with a progress report, and what I have to report is... less writing, more thinking. This state of affairs has been brought on by me having agreed to teach a class on novel writing at a local senior center. This in turn has forced me to do something I haven't done for a couple of decades: class prep.

This turns out to be a good thing, on the whole. Yes, I'm using my writing time to prep for class. But what I'm really doing is thinking about aspects of creating a novel. This week, for example, I've been focused on character. For those of you with amazing memories, you may recall that character is exactly what has been giving me holy heck in the last novel, so this might be a good thing.

At this point, I am realizing how much needs to be juggled in writing our characters: their voices. Their backstories. Their conflicts and motivations. Oh, yeah, and their physical descriptions, which I tend to more or less leave out, and is that okay? 

I've also been doing a lot of research in another area; more on that later. But it does mean that while I had intended to start revisions on one or the other of the two novels now existing in draft form, I'm struggling just to revise a simple short story.

So no updates since the story submission Dec. 31, except that I've completed and submitted another application for an artist's residency, and have a list of additional applications I want to put in over the next few months.

Maybe at some point my efforts to put some coherence on the process of writing a novel can become a book. Right now, my teaching notes are the sort of hot mess I'm used to in my rough drafts.

And... I'm busy fantasizing about the Canyon again.

Yeah, that canyon.