writing group - 2

The picture is a batchelor herd of eland --see, they all have horns, the longer more graceful the older these guys are. You see, unlike human males, these guys get better looking as they age. Sorry for the crack. Actually I don't know much about male elands, and sometimse feel I don't know much about male humans, or female ether. However, I recently read that brain scientests have shown that parts of the brain used often definteily group larger while little used parts don't grow larger. Whether they shrink or just seem smaller by contract wasn't explained in the fairly shallow article -- as newspaper science articles tend to be.

I'm thinking about this because I watched the dynamics of my new writing seminar and feel a sense of hopelessness at the group dynamics. Our two loud ladies badger the men about "emotion." They want angst or something spelled out in caps. These are guys who have no practiced emotional expression in some 60 years. They don't have the words, and I don't think they have the feelings. The badgering is a power play that is ugly and alienating. One man awkwardly but sincerely described dealing with his wife's new debilitating disease, a muscular weakness. I thought him very brave to write about massaging her legs and looking into her eyes and seeing a more beautiful woman than he saw at 21 -- a bit of a cliche, but an extremely brave on in the circumstances. Madame Badger wanted more. I wanted to choke her. The man was brave. He needed only some format pointers, not that harrangue.

Another man alluded to a very dramatic scene in a classroom. I suggested it would be wonderful to see the seen in a dramatic form, with voices and such. He said he only wanted to write what will fit on a single page of Microsoft format -- a stupid limit toset himself. Anyway, it was so powerful I came home and wrote the scene for myself -- no doubt entirely differently than happened as I had to imagine almost al of it. At this point I don't know whether to show him next week or not. It may seem an invasion, I'll have to find a tactful to express it. How undirected these people are. They want to write well but they get nothing truly helpful from the discussions

I'm pondering whether to offer to lead a "writing skills" class, possibly called "Writing with the whole brain" as a pay on the Drawing with the Left Side of the Brain. I wonder if anyone would shop up. Maybe I can't know if I don't offer it.