Thinking

By the end of this post, you may think I’m trying to get sympathy or that delicious brand of encouragement that you all provide.  I assure you, you’d be wrong.  (Though it is an AMAZING bonus.)  I’m just trying to tell the truth.  And the truth right now is that I’m shocked at myself.  I would have never guessed that I would react to this situation in this manner.

Last weekend I went to the Lewis and Clark Caverns with my family.  We all joked around about my potential reaction before we headed there.  Ha ha ha, isn’t it funny when we take the little Jewish girl from Detroit on adventures where there are bats.  Hannah and Bestie B’s middle girl were ahead of me as we traipsed into the depths of the caves, spelunking our little brains out. Every once in a while, B’s girl would turn to Hannah or me (I couldn’t tell because it was pitch black and smelled like a basement) and whisper in what I took to be a menacing voice, “We’re inside a mountain!”   Oh, how I wished for duct tape.  When my brother-in-law of sorts asked the guide how far into the mountain we were, I had to plug my ears before the guide answered.  This reaction was beyond my control.  I’ll tell you that much.

As much as I joke about who I am – an indoor girl, I’ll often say – when it comes right down to it, unless it deals with blood or bodily fluid, sometimes I can hold my own when push comes to shove.  There is, I’d love to think, just a hint of badass in me.  Somewhere.

But my reaction to those caves was involuntary.

My reaction to blood and bodily fluids, to words like “tissue” or “chunk” when used in the wrong context is involuntary.

And my reaction to this class is involuntary too.  Insecurity and consuming fear of what others will think dogs my every step. 

I wish I was brave.  I wish I didn’t care.  I wish I still drank or did drugs or AT THE VERY LEAST SMOKED CIGARETTES!  I wish I bit my nails.  Anything to quell this anxiety.  But I don’t.  So I have to deal with it another way.

Walking through it, apparently, with Big Big Power on my side.

We had our first workshop on Tuesday and, man, do these guys know how to think.  I might catch on eventually, but these academics, they know the way to think about things and they spend time doing it.  I was in awe of the way they talked about each other’s work – with reverent consideration and a lot of knowledge about the mechanisms of writing.

Where writing and reading are concerned, I have been pretty much a feel your way kind of cat.  I know when I like something.  I know when something moves me.  I know when something doesn’t.  I haven’t spent a whole lot of time breaking it down.  If you’ll refer back to my blog post Woolston Magic Part 1, you’ll see that I’ve been this way for a long time.  The thinkers are like Chris:

“Here’s what a lead sentence looks like,” he’ll say. “And here’s the organized manner in which you build off of it.”

While I am more like me:

“Well,” I counter, “I just get a really cool idea I like and then it just sort of...” then I wave my arms around like a crazy person to help make my point.

Even when I’ve gotten to work with someone else’s stuff, my comments, criticisms, suggestions do not come from a cerebral place.  (Apparently, I only like to use my brain against myself.)  I talk a lot about the underneath – some sort of elusive writing place I think they can reach.  Everything I contribute is geared toward them finding the place they may need to find in order to figure some stuff out for themselves.  See.  Elusive.

Here’s how the workshop went: 

We were asked to read two of our classmates’ stories, make marginal comments and then write half a page to a page of comments separately.  This was hard for me in a couple ways.  First, I am a technical editor for a living.  I had to email KC to find out if I was supposed to be making grammar/punctuation/spelling comments.  He told me not to get lost in the weeds.

The second reason it was hard is that I’ve never done this before.  Duh.  But I prayed, read the stories several times and did the best I could.

When we got to class, KC asked the first student to read a few paragraphs out loud (YIKES!!!!!) and then asked us all what we felt worked and didn’t work. 

At first it was a little impossible for me to concentrate, what with all the projecting and such.  After a moment of getting myself in my body and out of Thursday when the same thing was going to happen to me, I was able to be present, placing all my skills of observation onto these fabulous creatures who have been studying the art of studying a story for three or four or five years.  

I was full of admiration and wonder.  They are practiced at thinking about the structure of a story, HOW things work, WHY the author did a certain something, WHAT the mechanism is that moves things from Point A to Point B, as it were.  I found myself wondering if their brains worked like this when they wrote.  I am hoping I have the chance to ask one day.

While I might not be so great at dissecting a short story, I am a wiz at dissecting human behavior (just ask my poor poor husband).  I tried to absorb as much as I could about the language they used, the analytical way they moved through the exercise.  And then I tried really hard to create my own little mash up.

When I write or read, it is 79.9% attempted brainlessness and 20.1% critic.  Okay.  Maybe those tables get turned every once in a while.  For the most part though, I’m not conscious of why something’s going where it’s going or the device with which people are getting places.  I’m just trying my hardest to hold onto the thread.  Sometimes there’s an idea I’m interested in preserving.  For instance, the short story I submitted to workshop first is all about obsession.  I knew all the way through that I wanted to demonstrate this character’s choicelessness.  I tried to stay true to his inability to say no to the object of his mania.  Other than that, I just sort of go where it takes me. 

Oftentimes, I am caught entirely unawares at something that happens, or better yet, at some pattern I notice when everything is said and done.  It’s kind of a crazy, Hey! Look what God did! kind of thing. 

When I’m reading, feeling good is a must.  I pay a lot of attention to how it’s making me FEEL, but not a whole lot of time paying attention to why.  If the good juju isn’t present right away, I move on, put the book down, try not to feel bad about not being able to get into it.

It’s kind of cool and scary to think about potentially harnessing this, seeing if I can shove it into a structure of some kind.  Learning!  What an amazing deal!

So I’m up tomorrow.  If I think about it for even a half a second, the blood vessels or muscles or something in my arms constrict and my heart starts pounding like crazy.  I start shaking and imagine I’m going to throw up at any moment.  I’m going to read out loud.  They’re going to say things and I’m going to listen.  It is only – ONLY I TELL YOU – because you walked through these very emotions with me a few short days ago that I feel I may be able to do it again. 

Here’s to hoping I react to life like a normal human being someday!