So, I am teaching a class in writing Short Fiction at Bryn Mawr College this semester.  (An aside: I like beginning blog posts with “so” it somehow makes me feel less as though I am WRITING.) So, as luck would have it – thank you,luck – this class is made up of exactly the kind of students I most love to teach.  They listen.  They ask questions.  They write with a full-speed ahead type of energy that’s allowed me quickly to understand a bit about what aspects of this pursuit  call out to each of them.  They sit in the classroom and look like they care – not necessarily as though I have them riveted, but as though the idea that they might better understand how to write the things they want to write has them riveted.  And I love being in the room with them.   At least I did yesterday.  I’m sure I’ll have my grumpy days.  But yesterday was one of those magical teaching days.  For me, anyway.

[As a little digression here, just a few words about the whole "can you really teach people how to write?" thing.  My own philosophy on this is that it's the wrong question.  The question I prefer to ask and have answered for myself - in the affirmative - is can you help people better understand why they want to write and how they might best help themselves reach those goals?  How can you make the process - inevitably tortuous as it is for us all at times - as valuable and as meaningful and as satisfying for that individual as possible?  I don't worry about teaching people how to be good writers or publishable writers - I worry, quite a lot as it happens - about helping people who want to write, love to write.  And in my experience the more they love doing it, the better they are at it.  And the better they become, the more they love doing it.  And the more they love doing it, the more easily and eagerly they can absorb the technical, craft aspects that will help them become even more pleased with the results.   Maybe that's a somewhat specious way of dodging the question, but it keeps me on track.]

So, there I was yesterday with this room full of students, early days in the semester and we’re all adjusting to one another – in what feel like productive ways.   I’m using some new workshopping methods that seem to be valuable.  No one is even close to having fallen asleep.  Or burst into tears.  And then at the very end I hear myself saying to them:  “I just want to tell you that if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to write, don’t just write.  Don’t just fiddle around in it.  Try to be a great writer.  Think about the writers who have moved you,the ones who have made you want to do this, and aim to be in their company.  Don’t take every word you produce too seriously, but take the power of words seriously, always.  Take the potential to be powerful seriously, that potential in each of you.  Write to reach that potential.”

Or something like that.

I’m cringing a bit now writing this, as I cringed right after class.  Because what on earth did I mean? I, who am the champion of people letting themselves play on their pages. (“Stories are like mud pies!” I tell students.  “Keep mucking around in them!  Don’t take yourself so seriously”).  I, who advise every student I have to tape a card over their computer saying:  “No one ever has to read a single word I write” – just exactly to banish the pressure to be Great.  (What does it even mean: GREAT??  I hate the very word.)

This bothered me all afternoon.  And during the night.  Ugh.  But what I woke up thinking today is that by “great” I didn’t mean some overblown version of “good” – though I’m afraid it may have sounded that way to them.   I didn’t mean, when you sit down at the keyboard, make sure you try to write well, make sure it’s  Really Well-Written – because that’s precisely the point of the card taped above the screen.  To free them, to free me, from the impulse to try to be a Good Writer.  To remember that you can write anything AT ALL and hide it away.  Hit delete.  Print it and shred it.  So yes, play in those mud pies.  Do things that seem outrageous.  Embarrassing.  That seem downright bad.

The thing is, of course, that words are damned tricky things.  We writers depend on their slippery nature.  I mentioned that in my first post – the way that the meaning of a word is both seductively specific – yes, that’s precisely it! I pinned that baby down! – and at the same time also infinite.  Therein lies their glory – and their potential for all manner of  betrayal.

So, yes, of course, by “great,” I didn’t mean “really good.”  I meant something completely different from that.  I meant write what only you can write.  Write what matters to you.  Write about those things, from those angles that deep in your private self you believe are yours alone – your views, your understandings, your sense of what is important about this life thing we have been handed, its finite nature, our capacities for love and cruelty and recovery; and the times when those capacities let us down. Or whatever it is that matters to you.

No wonder they looked at me like I was a little bit nuts.  (I imagine them in their dining hall:  “we have this wacky writing teacher . . .She’s a little too. . intense. . “)   I was talking to them in that class – I swear I was.  But of course I was also  – really, I suppose -  talking to myself.  Which is arguably not an ideal thing to do in a class.  But it’s early days in the semester.  There’s time to catch that impulse in myself.

Maybe every blog post I write for a while is going to circle around to the fact that I’m sitting here, 47 years old, waiting for my first book to come out.  And, for better and worse, it’s a book in which I did what I am advising them to do.  I wrote about what I think matters.  I wrote – oh, what hubris we writers we need to have and eventually to own up to having! – from the angle I think of as mine alone.  I said what I believe no one else can say.  Told ten stories I believe I alone can tell.  And while I cannot possibly judge the quality of the work, and stopped trying to do some time ago, I know how very honest a book it is.  How very exposing.  I know the exact moment at which I decided to allow my truest self to be there, in those words.  I know it is a book, that though fictional, entirely so, carries inside it,  my infant self, my childhood, my young womanhood, my early years of parenting, my current years, these years in which I can’t help but understand that years are finite things.  All  of me.  There I am.  288 pages worth.   And it is scary as hell.

Yet I know as I sit here, excited, anxious, relieved and also numb at times, waiting for its arrival, the one thing I don’t regret, won’t ever regret, is having put it all in there, having gone for broke.  And that’s what I wanted them to know.

Can you know that at 18 and 19?   Even 21?

Note to self: on Thursday, in class, maybe clarify a little bit:  Um, so when I said that about going for greatness. . .don’t go for greatness.  That’s not really what I meant.  But if you’re going to write, if you really want to do this, for heaven’s sake, for your own, and for ours, please throw caution to the wind.

Maybe they’ll still think I’m a little nutty, a little intense about all this.  I suppose I am. Especially during these waiting days.  But maybe they’ll remember that advice one day and be glad for it.

Even teaching presents us opportunities to revise, it seems.  And thank goodness for that.