Creative Writing in the time of Covid

The Creative Writing class continues apace, if by "apace" we can include facing each other in the little screen boxes of a Zoom meeting. It's beginning to feel natural to avoid seeing others face to face and instead to gaze stonily at a tiny dot on the top of your screen and see yourself in one of the little boxes.

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.” - Robert Burns.

Done. I even turned off mirroring. Not yet freed of foolish notions, but I've discovered I'm asymmetric.

The team continues to write and we continue to critique. I learn a lot but write very little. Fifteen or so people turn up to the Zoom meetings, three send pieces for critique, and we have one or two 5 or 10 minute periods of 'freewriting', an exercise that makes my mind go completely blank.

The teacher gives us two words and asks us to write a piece about them. If meditation teachers knew about it, they'd adopt the technique. They'd pull two pieces of paper out of a tin of stamp-sized sheets with words written on them and tell us to think about what the words bring up in our imagination.

Teacher: "Umbilical. Ma Po Tofu."

My Brain: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.

There are some very good amateurs in the class. One is a phenomenal writer in the word/sentence/paragraph sense but rambles like Trump in speech, which I find interesting. One loves European writers, which shows in terms of his subject matter and attention to detail. Many are concentrating on memoir and have interesting stories to tell, although it's hard to know if they have a book-full each. I'm not interested in it myself, and balk at questions about what I've done or what I feel, almost as hard as I stall at the freewriting exercises.

One thing I don't bring up in critiques and probably should is the treatment that the Serious Men of the class bring to female characters. I spend a lot of time on the internet reading people who are so woke that you couldn't scare up a cis het white male character in there if you waved an AR 15 and a jar of mayonnaise and shouted, "Hey soy boy!" In contrast, the Serious Men of the class write about exciting, deep, dark, disturbed white men. Women are presented as objects, which the protagonist acts upon.

We had a short story where a man goes to visit a woman for no reason as far as I could tell, then beats her up. She does not fight back. For more information reread the last sentence. She has so little agency she doesn't even try to run.

Another of the Serious Men wrote a long and very well-written piece about a man who is obsessed with another man. The object of his obsession is described in great, loving detail, from his college days (which the protagonist had researched - it was before they met) to his shirt and to his car. The story is named after him, and he is nicknamed after his car. The car, like the man, is described in detail, and the car has agency - its temperamental ways are a plot point. The reason the protagonist is obsessed with him is that he knows a woman the protagonist had interacted with before the story began. The previous interaction is never described. And the woman, when we eventually meet her, is barely described. The protagonist is driven to her house by the car-man in his erratic car, where the protagonist kills the woman and the man as well.

To be fair, some of the Serious Men write about themselves and don't really mention women, or about a character's childhood, much of which seems to be spent in reform schools or orphanages and not have any women in it. They don't all write about psychopaths.

The women are a more varied lot - from the spiritual seeker to the memoirists to the one with the fabulous voice - and tend to have both men and women in their stories. I think because of our mutual age, there is a tendency for the men characters to be doers and the women to be opinion-havers, but for most of us, that's what growing up was like. Stories set in the present day, written by the women, generally treat men and women as two types of human beings.

Going to video conferencing has reduced the tendency of readings and critiques to become therapy sessions. When someone writes about a father being distant, or a  father womanizing, or someone being sexually assaulted, there's a minefield where criticizing the writing may be criticizing the writer. Safely behind our screens, sending marked up Word documents back and forth, this is minimized.

It's certainly an interesting class, and a first for me. I've been to workshops like "How to write the perfect query letter!" (A: Enclose a $50 bill.*) Or, "What is tight third person omniscient pluperfect?" (A: "He hadn't worked out by then that he had written in the tight third person omniscient pluperfect.") I hadn't been to a long course where I was expected to write things.

OK, now write for ten minutes on these two words: Error. Nature.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.


*This is not the actual way to write the perfect query letter.

Merope (fiction, 500 words)

My creative writing class prompt was to write about the rituals that evolve when you are trying to survive in isolation. Here's my 500 words.

***

I got wearily out of the bunk, folded it into the wall and stuffed the bag into the sanitizer. My daily checklist was on a clipboard because there was something tactile about pencils that I didn’t get from a tablet. They say that knowing what you like and sticking with it is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

Khaliunaa was already at the watch station, as usual smelling of flowers, a remarkable feat since we were three and a half million miles from earth. Whatever perfume she’d smuggled on board had lasted – what? I was losing track of time. More than eleven months. At first I’d considered objecting. Some people are allergic to fragrances, I considered saying. It’s antisocial, I imagined myself arguing. But getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. And anyway, it covered up the smell from the food preparation area. (The food itself was perfectly seasoned, designed to keep us lonely crew members relatively satisfied on these long, tedious tours. The lingering smell was not lovely.)

The watch station was in the center of the cupola, where you could observe the stars slowly rotate around you. Occasionally, dim pepperoni-red Mars or bright coral Jupiter would appear for a stately procession outside the glass. The instruments, of course, did all the watching, but Mission Command had psychologists by the truckload, and they had advocated for a big, wide, panoramic window to keep the inhabitants sane. The instruments could detect the signature of a rocket engine tens of astronomical units away. Millions of miles before a person could see a flare.

Khaliunaa, too, had a checklist – hers was on a tablet – because a checklist to keep you mentally moving forward is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. I swear the first item on hers, because she says something like it every morning, is her little joke. She spotted me and prepared to say it.

“Hey, Kareem, can you see something moving – there – across the Pleiades?”

“Ha ha, very funny,” I said, fumbling with the squishy plastic packaging of a breakfast. I’d gotten bored with the formerly astonishing sight of the constellations months ago and didn’t look up.

“I mean it this time.”

“Sure you do.” I munched the vanilla granola, trying to keep the noise down because getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

“Kareem? We have to alert Mission Command.”

Unnerved, I looked at my instrument display. There was nothing hot out there. Maybe she’d spotted a comet? Not unheard of. I grabbed a bar and pulled myself up into the cupola. My eyes tracked across the constellations to the bright blue throng of the Pleiades. The beautiful Seven Sisters of legend shone brightly. Then there were six. Then seven. Something had briefly eclipsed Merope.

Something coasting in.

Then the unknown body flared red. A rocket engine had fired.

Klaxons blared across the watchtower. 

Battle stations.

***