Last night was the first meeting of this fiction class I'm taking at Penn. I think I'll like it? The story assignments are really short--no more than 5 pages or 1,500 words. I have written a couple of short pieces, but it's hard to write a complete story with that word constraint. I will try. At least I'm not the oldest person in the class; though 90% of the students are in undergrad, two of us are older (plus the teacher). We wrote a couple of free-writes--we wrote about one of our favorite books as a child (
Little House on the Prairie. Someone else in the class choose Eloise at the Plaza, another one my favs), and then later we wrote about our favorite movie as an adult (
Annie Hall) and how the two are alike somehow. Our 1o minute free-write for each day this week is to describe a physical action in detail such as washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, plucking your eyebrows, eating spaghetti. This morning, I wrote about taking out the garbage, an activity I hate very much, mostly, as I figured out from the free-write, it always reminds me of how I didn't succeed the week before--you know, it has a wine bottle in it, frozen chicken I never made, moldy vegetables I also never made, discarded boxes of pasta, newspapers I'm too lazy to recycle, etc. But it's also because I dislike cleaning the litter box and that's something I have to do every Wednesday too. Here's the first line of the free-write (I'm using the Evie character): "her life would be so, so much better if Wednesday everything didn't always end with trash." I'm also trying to work on the noir story, but have written myself into a corner. Will have to kill everyone off immediately for it to work.
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