The Secret to Writing Fiction -- Just Do It!

I missed class last week due to a severe inner ear infection. According to Ben, the kid who sits next to me, there were a lot of people missing last week due to illness.

Thankfully on Tuesday Professor Ritterbusch reviewed some of the major lecture points from last week. One of them addressed story line sequence --accepted standards for writing a story in a linear or non-linear fashion. I was a happy he addressed this because it happens to be very relevant to me and how to proceed with my memoir. Although my memoir "starts" at age 13, rather than continue my story in a linear fashion I felt a tug to now go back and write about the first decade of my life. I wasn't feeling confident about bouncing back to an earlier time until Ritterbusch stressed that indeed it is perfectly fine to do so. Even though I had already pretty much decided to now jump back 10 years, I was glad to have some confirmation and insight into employing the non-linear technique.

After the lecture, Prof Ritterbusch decided it was time we all try writing some fiction. He had the class divide up into five groups to collaborate on writing a short fiction piece, after which we were to share it with the rest of the class. He gave us 25 minutes to complete it, and we were allowed to use our 15-minute break in addition if we needed. We all wound up using our break.

I've never been a fan of fiction -- for some reason fiction has never been able to hold my interest like non-fiction does. And I certainly have never entertained the idea of writing fiction. This was a first for me -- and I was greatly relieved that I had three other classmates in on this experiment with me. I pretty much saw myself as a complete fiction loser -- reading or writing.

But, like with so many other things when it comes to writing, just doing it usually brings some unexpected surprises. With my three other classmates, I found myself blurting out scenarios, dialog, and suggestions for where the story should go. It seemed very new and foreign to me, but not intimidating, as I thought it would be. In fact, I actually began to enjoy guiding our imaginary characters through our science fiction story. Yes, science fiction -- one of the other students, Lindsay, thought it would be cool to write about aliens. I was inwardly horrified, but she seemed confident, and we all just jumped on board. She is supposed to e-mail me a copy of the story, and when I receive it, I will post it here. The story itself is not exactly prize-winning literature, but that wasn't the purpose of the exercise -- just doing it was. And on that merit, I feel it was a success. I have dipped my toe into the mysterious and intimidating world of fiction writing, and I learned I could do it. Amazing.

There's only one more class meeting, next Tuesday, before the semester ends. One week after that our writing portfolios are due. We all have to write around 30 pages of various genres -- from memoir, to various forms of poetry, to fiction. Much of it is our choice. I'm currently working on chapter two of my memoir, which I will include in my portfolio. Chapter two covers the first ten years of my life, which, if you were writing in a linear fashion would technically be chapter "one" and chapter two would be the chapter I already wrote. Thank goodness for creative license!

And, thank goodness for awesome professors. I can't believe how lucky I was to have wound up in Professor Ritterbusch's class, particularly after such a long hiatus from college. He's an amazing professor -- extremely knowledgeable, a great lecturer, and a fantastic motivator. I haven't had a chance to read any of his poetry books to date, but I plan to buy all of the books he has written and read them over the summer. I very much look forward to that.

For those interested in Ritterbusch's poetry, here are a couple of links: Far From The Temple Of Heaven , Lessons Learned, Dale Ritterbusch .

Next week we're watching a movie in class. Until then, I have some fiction writing to do.