Currently reading

Student first chapters and outlines -- a great way to get a feel for what my students are going to be working on this year, though sometimes one will change horses midway through, but that's okay.

Trouble is that most of them have been together for a year already and know each other's novels intimately, whereas this is the first time I've seen them. It's more work for me, of course, but well worth the time and is always interesting to see where they're coming from. I've also had them talking about their novels and filling out a questionnaire, so hopefully I'll have a good handle for where they're coming from.

One of the worries that someone will always have is what if what they're writing isn't my thing. I'm a genre fiction writer, which their first year teacher wasn't, so the genre writers are always happy to discover that. (And it's a great balance to have.) But even so, there can be that persistent niggle. And really it doesn't matter. There will always be books that aren't quite my thing, but it doesn't mean I can't look at them objectively to see whether they're working, how well executed they are. I'm more interested in the craft than whether something rings my particular bells.

One of my pet peeves in workshopping is the workshopper who says they can't comment on something because it's not their genre. What a cop out. I was in a workshop once where someone had written a magic realism story and every workshopper except me and the workshop leader used that line. It was hardly fair to the poor writer who had made detailed comments on everyone else's stories even though they weren't in the same genre as what she was writing. Anyone can comment on craft, and, really, one of the great pleasures of teaching writing is the variety of projects we get to work with, so students shouldn't worry about such things but should rejoice in the fact that they're writing something only they can write.

Currently watching

Over the last few weeks, my husband and I have been watching a series of motivational talks on TED.com. We've watched all kinds of things, including a fascinating talk on statistics. Yeah, I know. Go figure.

The TED site has heaps of great content and is well worth a browse. A lot more than a browse, actually. This is a site you could lose yourself in for days if you have time!

Here's today's (for us) by James Cameron, good not just for the Avatar-mad lot (like me), but all those of us who are creative, artistic or imaginative in our endeavours. It's called James Cameron: Before Avatar . . . a curious boy.

I'm going to pin his parting quote near my computer, so I can look at it when I'm wrestling with my novel: "Failure is an option, but fear is not." Go listen to the talk for the context. It's well worth the seventeen minutes that it takes.

The pressure of writing

We were at writing group today, and one of the writers said that she had been thinking of writing something but had been unable to pick up the pen, that she thought she might be afraid of the pen. It's funny how things come together by happenstance, but one of my students had just blogged on our student blog about how much harder it was to write when he knew he was writing something for school.

Why do we do this to ourselves? I will always come back to the value of free writing, where one of the rules is that you are free to write the worst crap in the world. I know about free writing, but it doesn't mean that I haven't been subject to this particular kind of fear. It might be a particularly nasty crit, or sometimes even something that wasn't meant to be nasty. I can remember being put off for a whole year because a well-known writer told me one of my stories was nicely written but that it obviously wasn't a story. Wasn't a story? That was news to me. And it shook my confidence in my own writing because I decided that I didn't know what a story was. I should have asked why it wasn't, but I was too stunned by the comment at the time.

I've seen it in writers who have had early work published to great acclaim. In published novelists, it's often called second-book syndrome. It's that pressure to write something even better, when you're not sure you can write something that's even as good.

I'd like to think we all develop thicker skins with experience, but I'm not sure it's true. I've heard one famous, best-selling and best-loved YA writers say he wasn't sure he had another book in him.

In the end, I think the best way around this is to just to write what you love. Write it for yourself. Write it because you love doing it. Allow yourself to write it badly because, after all, you can fix a badly written page, but you cannot fix a blank one.