Taking the Plunge

As of today I am enrolled in a creative writing course. That's right; I am willingly subjecting myself to the review of other people. This will be the first course I have ever taken that is devoted to the trade of writing. Beyond assignments from Literature teachers in school I have never written anything that did not come from some spur of the moment desire for a release. This is the first step, I believe, in getting past all of the previously mentioned stigmas and barriers I've created to shield myself. Well, maybe this blog was the first. This class will be the second. What made me decide to take this particular course was its name. It's called The Fear of Writing. How appropriate is that?

I have yet to get an assignment. I send the request to take the course. I was accepted. I filled out a form about myself, my goals, and what's stopping me. So far so good. I'm very interested to see what comes of this. Just the act of signing up has gotten me thinking about what sort of other courses I could take or what other avenues I could pursue that would get me a little further down the road towards being a published author. Who knows, it may happen yet.

This is also the first class I have taken in three years or so that was not required of me. The last few years of college were devoted to courses required for graduation and it has been over a year since I graduated. My degree was in accounting which is about as far as you can get from what I'm trying to do now. There is very little creativity involved in that career so far as I can tell. Regardless, I am excited to be taking a class of my own choosing once again. The last three or four classes that I took out of pure interest were archaeology and anthropology courses in college. At the time I didn't realize why they interested me so much but now I think I do. They are much more closely related to a career in writing than accounting ever was. The study of people is incredibly interesting. I've been doing it my whole life without realizing it. Whether alive or dead, you can learn a lot about people by what they surround themselves with. If the people are alive, you can learn even more by watching how they interact with their surroundings and with other people. I study these things without realizing it. I've always done this. Be quiet. Observe. People will tell you anything you want to know without ever saying a word to you.

When I was young I used this type of perception to figure out how to change other people's perception of me. In elementary school I was never the cool kid. I didn't want to be. I didn't like how those people treated each other or anyone else. I made friends with the other kids like me not because it was a last resort but because they were people who also refused to change themselves in order to be accepted. So we watched the cool kids. We learned.

When it came time to pick a middle school I chose one on the other side of town, one where I would be relatively unknown. I knew that this would be the best way to shed the preconceived perceptions of all the people I had gone to school with for the past six years. I had an extensively thought out plan. I would not change my personality, but I would not make the same mistakes that I had early on in elementary school. Children look for the quiet kid, the easy target, to vent their frustrations on. Adults do this too, but that is a whole different story. If you are that quiet kid then you only have two options. You can either take what they dish, all the time, or you can find a way to deflect their attentions elsewhere. This is not a hard thing to do but for a young person it can be terrifying. The only way to not be the target is to not be worth the trouble.

Only a week or so into competitive athletics a ritual had begun in the locker room. Ten or so of the aggressive kids would pick a target, a quiet shy kid, and one of them would pick a fight with him. It was a very natural way for kids to develop a hierarchy amongst themselves. I knew my turn was coming because if you didn't participate with the aggressive kids, you became one of the targets. Most of these confrontations consisted of pushing weaker kids into lockers for ten or so minutes until the bell for the next class started. Pushing back did no good; it only escalated the aggressive ones testosterone to the level of punching. It was what they wanted. My turn came. One guy cornered me in the locker room. I told him to leave me alone. He told me he had heard me talking bad about him. This was the ruse that they used to start the fight. I told him to go away. Meanwhile the other kids gathered in a semicircle around, cutting off escape, and getting ready for the show. At this point there is no turning back; there is only one simple choice. Be a target from this point on, or put a stop to it right here. I made the wrong choice in elementary school and I wasn't going to do that again. As soon as the other kid pushed me the first time I punched him. Right in the eye. Hard enough to give him a black eye. He fell, the bell rang, and everyone left to go to the next class.

This did a few things for me. First, I became too much trouble to be the easy target. Second, I gained the respect of every 12 year old in the locker room. Most importantly, it made them leave me alone. That's all it took. Never again was I a target. The kid I hit eventually became a friend. Adults work in very similar ways. You cannot hit them without getting sued, but you don't need to. The point of all of this is not to advocate hitting, but to realize that an understanding of basic psychology can tell you a lot about how to understand motives. It can teach you how to manipulate them.

This is what writers do. We create people and then find out how they tick. We put them in tough situations to see how they'll react. It has to be believable. Writers have to understand that every decision a character makes will depend greatly on every key event that took place in that character's life up to that point. If a character does something beyond the realm of believability then the reader will stop caring. Just like that. The psychology of the characters affects the psychology of the reader. Kids love Harry Potter because every one of them can relate to at least one character in those stories. Adults love it because they remember being able to relate in the same way.

So my psychology is this. I'm in a situation where I know what I want to do but I fear it. I have a long row to hoe but I know that it is something I need to do. So I'm going to learn how. I think I have a pretty good understanding of the basics but for what I intend to do I need to understand a lot more than that. Classes are no longer about getting my ticket punched; they are about learning how to accomplish the tasks I've set for myself. I read. I write. I will be a novelist.