Sometimes, only occasionally, somebody asks me about my blog. What am I doing, why? It's a personal discipline for me. One huge influence was a college class I took in, when, 1972? at UC Santa Cruz called Daily Fiction. Taught by a Politics professor, it was modeled on a class called "Daily Themes" at Yale.
The Yale class is still famous, check it out on the internet. I don't think they still teach it at UCSC, I could write Mr. Steve and ask.
Here's the deal. Every day you write a piece of fiction, broadly defined. At least 300 words. Must be in the teacher's box by a certain hour (I guess now, it would be emailed; those days we walked a lot more) Once a week, we met and discussed our work. It sounds easy but was quite difficult.
You find that you write from your own life (just like this blog). One thing I learned...just because that's the way it happened in real life does not make it good fiction.
So we wrote and wrote all quarter. It felt good to me. Some days you just had nothing in mind. I wonder now, do I have more things to draw on since I am 57 rather than 20? I don't know.
I don't have the gift as my daughter does, the characters she writes about, they are important and sentient, she's always wondering what they will do next. She participates in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) where you write a novel in the month of November. I think she's done it 4 years. One year it was an adventure novel a la Indiana Jones. She said "I would like to get it into more character development but every few pages I have to have something blow up.
You really gain an appreciation for the novelist. 307 words.
Picture from UCSC 1974. Students working in the Crown Library.
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