A moment you'll never forget

I'm reading two other books and two magazines but I just couldn't resist beginning Jon Turk's The Raven's Gift last night. I loved hearing him speak; in five pages I already love his writing.

My assignment to my writing class for next week is to write about one of those "I'll never forget" moments. I think I'll read to them the first two pages of Turk's book because it begins with such a moment. It changed his life, as such moments sometimes do. As a lab-bound chemist he had little time outdoors but one spring day he went for a walk with his dog in the mountains [Colorado]. Dog had a frenzy of hole digging in the spongy, wet earth, sniffing and going on to dig another hole and repeat. Turk didn't understand what the dog was doing and finally began sniffing at the holes himself and discovered an earth scent that seemed the essence of spring. He began to feel he needed to be outside and became an extreme adventurer and traveler, also a very good writer and story teller.

My writing class of adults over 55, are people who have experienced a great deal, they are writing more freely now than they did at first which is the point of the class [and, I realize, not entirely due to anything I did, but to their greater comfort with one another]. I will be curious what they write. I hope it will lead them to start to write something they will feel is significant, maybe not for class but after the class is completed.

I haven't read enough yet to know Turk's process but I believe that for many people putting an incident into words on paper [or computer], i.e., into visual form rather than the amorphousness of thoughts that may be fuzzed over with visual memories and sensual memories of many sorts, is the first step to understanding something important about yourself or the world around them. This is far from an original thought, but part of whatt I'm trying to both tell and show my class -- actually, not so much show, as lead them to discover as they write. My frustration, which is not very important, is that I will not know if I have succeeded because most people will only feel and discover after the fact. It's okay that I will not know, teachers almost never how much or little they've accomplished.

Off to a decent start

Two days into NaNoWriMo with the goal of 50,000 words -- I've done over 5,000, more than 10%. But this weekend will be a blank so I'm hoping to get ahead. And I'm asking myself -- so what? This a purely voluntary writing exercise. I can tell myself it's important to reach the goal but I know it doesn't make a bit of difference in the long run, not to the world [most certainly!] and not really to my ego. It's a game and I am usually a bad game player because winning is never very important to me. The "Competitive" screw in my personality is loose, maybe got lost along life's way.

Anyway, I'm discovering things as I write -- various unexpected facts about the characters as I first describe them. Some people do all that in advance. I like to surprise myself, which pieces of my own background/reading/experience I can draw on. It's fun. My main character has taught school in Mongolia. This sets her apart from the potentially insipid person I originally had in mind. Her aunt is a retired school teacher who likes the "warhorses of middle school poetry" -- that offers some potential for dialog. These little bits are fun.

The big discovery is that I'm not writing the genre piece I said to myself I would write. Currently there is a minor genre of books that feature quilts or quilters, sweet stories, some of them historical, mostly, I take it [not having read any] well plotted and well researched. My research, from immersion in the subject, is pretty solid, but I'm not writing an easy-to-read genre piece. I don't think I can do that for any genre. I have never in my life wanted to write what people want -- thus I refused to study journalism in college. The questions looming in my mind are already bigger -- art questions, art versus craft questions, intention of folk artists. And then there's a trio of old ladies -- two among the old-old, over 85, one hearty seeming and the other frail. I don't know yet, but one or maybe both will die. My young character will have to deal with that, too.

The photo is a quilt of mine that is not quite the kind of wild, mostly unlovely -- or so the locals think -- quilts that feature in the story. But this one is on the "wild" side -- too much so for me to want to live with, so I gave it to Leslie who liked it. But then she lives in California and the sensibility is a bit different out on the Left Coast. Time to go back to my NaNo work.