But Call Me Betsy

When I was in Montauk for a month of writing, I did it every day, mostly in the mornings. I did it because I felt obligated to get words on a page. I'd asked my work and my family to give me this time, and it would be irresponsible not to keep my part of the bargain and meet my word count every day.  But only sometimes did I enjoy it. Rarely. Often, I would have to pause and get up from the chair, go pull a book off a shelf and hope something from that novel would give me another paragraph or a new direction. For the first two weeks, I also read books at night about the craft of writing, John Gardner's The Art of Fiction , E.M. Forester's Aspects of  Novel (dry, difficult), Stephen King's On Writing , and books about organ donation (because that was the subject of my novel). Or short stories. And also Josh Ferris' book about the dentist. His book was the most inspiring in some ways because he does weird things like spend two pages describing the character trying t...

Today in multimedia, we will talk about workshops. Most of the students have never been in a workshop environment, so I'm guessing the class can go in a couple of different directions: 1. They will be too polite to offer criticism to help the writers, opting instead to either stay silent or comment on easily changeable things like the title. 2. They could go the other way and say things like, I don't understand this at all . It's boring. I suspect that won't be the case, because these students are cautious and polite. 3. They could not talk much at all, and I will end up talking for most of the time. I guess that's okay if I go through the bulk of the critique, as long as I am able to skim their manuscripts ahead of time and have some general comments to offer. The other thing I need to communicate is that the writers don't speak, and don't defend.  That's the model I'm comfortable with, though I could take Molly G.'s approach and as...

First continuing ed class at Princeton High  School last night. They offer a bunch over the course of the fall and spring--eight weeks focused on topics ranging from learning a new language to cooking with onions to samba dancing and mystery writing. I started another class like this last year, but only went twice--not because the class wasn't interesting, but because it met on Thursday nights which was one of the few times a week that both Luke and Dan were out of the house. The class costs $125, so it is highly affordable.  And classes are held in the high school, so as I was looking for the classroom, I kept passing posters for the Homecoming dance and a project for National Hispanic Heritage month, and thinking, Luke sees these same things every day. It's a beautiful school, and my class was held in the French room. I surmised this by the map of France next to the blackboard and the language exercises on the wall. As I imagined, the class was mostly adults in their ear...

Erin lent me David Sedaris' book of found diaries from a couple of decades of his life, and it reminds me that, if you're going to be a writer, you really have to keep track of what's going. Basically, the book is excerpts of the diary he kept while in Chicago and then for his first few years in New York. He goes from being a house painter and handyman to being a well-known writer and darling of NPR, but it doesn't happen because he gets lucky--it happens because he keeps writing, and observing, and putting himself out into reading spaces. He's basically always on the cusp of financial failure, but still manages to keep trying. And of course, Amy Sedaris is his sister, and she's one of my favorite, funniest people, so he's also funny. She's one of the characters in Homecoming, which we're listening to in class currently. Anyway, I feel like to succeed as a writer, you have to always be paying attention and I certainly don't do that, not on the tr...

I haven't been writing here because I'm teaching a night class at Rutgers and we have a class blog that I write in a couple of times a week. It's called Diaries of Jane Err , which I thought was clever, but now it seems like the students must secretly be calling it the "Diarrhea of Jane Err," which is certainly what I would do if I were in their shoes. The class meets once a week from 4:30 to 7:30--really a good time for me because I don't have to miss work to teach, it's only once a week, and the class doesn't go late. My colleague teaches too, but her course meets from 6 to 9 p.m. Most of the blog content includes suggestions for assignments, or embedded content I want to use in class, so it saves me the time of having to Google something in the middle of teaching. There's nothing really personal, and so I have been trying to write in my 750 words journal, but that's sporadic too. My new idea is to post here, so that the blog doesn't ...