Day in the Life of an Idiot

Sometimes I think I should have an alternate blog which is titled, "All Learning is Purely Accidental," wherein I just collect all of the crazy stories of my teaching "style."

Yesterday, I "taught" (yes, I know I'm overusing the air quotes, but seriously, I suck,) the Fan Fiction First Pages at Nokomis Library in Minneapolis. First of all, getting there was a nightmare. As I have long said, the Minneapolis fairies have rejected me. They smell a Saint Paulie coming and they make everything simple complicated. Like the fact that there is a Minnehaha Boulevard, Minnehaha Parkway, and Minnehaha Avenue THAT ALL INTERSECT AT ONE ROUNDABOUT and the SIGNAGE SUCKS ROCKS. I was meant to take one, but, of course, went down all the others first.

So there was screaming into cell phones, a few frustrated tears, but, thanks to a calm and loving spouse and Google Maps, I arrived only six minutes late.

But, I was late, and that put me on edge. I hate being late. Especially for things like this.

It was a small class. The Loft told me I could expect as many as fifteen kids, but there were only four. In a way that made it easier. I also had absolutely no idea what to expect. The sense I'd gotten reading about it was that it was informal. Kind of a drop-in session. But, it seemed as if the expectation was something a lot more classroom like. So, I kind of started winging it, like I do.

I should also interject here to say that I was on day four of a terrible stomach flu. I'd had almost nothing to eat all day, so I was kind of loopy.

We ended up talking about plot. I drew my theory of the plot arc on the white board. My theory is that it's not so much an arc, but a valley, where your character gets deeper and deeper into sh*t. By the middle of the book/story/fic (or perhaps 2/3rds in), your character should be in serious sh*t, but be beginning to see the way out. We talked about external forces acting as plot, and how it's just as important to remember the internal pressures. If I'd felt better I might have remembered to have them ask the "what's at stake?" question, but I petered out.

We talked very specifically about the feeling one of the young women had about 'stealing other people's ideas.' She didn't put it that way, what she said was, "What do you do to avoid repetition?" What it turned out she meant was, "What if I see a cool cross-over idea, but I think, 'yeah, that, only with my interpretation'?" to which I said, FOR GOD'S SAKE WRITE IT. First of all, I reminded her, the idea of the original idea is a complete and utter myth. We are all building on each other's thoughts. Plato did it to Aristotle. It's how ideas work. You should never feel ashamed to be inspired by something someone else wrote. I told her about how I wrote my first published novel because I really loved an X-File episode, except it didn't quite do all the things I wanted. That's where a LOT of ideas come from--good ideas. ORIGINAL IDEAS. Because ideas are free and they want to grow and multiply. There's nothing new under the sun, as is said. You're only in trouble when you copy someone's exact words. That's plagiarism. Don't do that. But steal ideas? YES.

We talk about stealing each other's ideas a lot in my writers' group. Sometimes there will even be an obvious theme going, where everyone is kind of writing about the same stuff. ONLY DIFFERENT. Because that's the beauty of it, and why a single prompt can generate multiple stories. Every artist/writer will have a different vision of the same idea.

The short of it? The young lady seemed really relieved by my rant.

I can't remember much else we talked about, though I know I flailed around for some time after that. Finally, the library liaison suggested that I offer up some prompts and get people writing. Terrifyingly, I did. Do you know how hard it is to come up with writing prompts on the fly?

But, because this was about fan fiction, I decided to do some things you might not think to do with your favorite character/character you want to explore. And, I just made a crazy list. What was your character like in high school? What will they be like in old age? What kind of joke would they tell? If your character were interviewing for a mundane job (like a secretary or ditch digger), how might the interview go? Stupid stuff like this. However, it seemed to work because heads went down and pencils came up.

So, I opened my laptop and wrote, too.

Technically, that means I got paid to write Bleach fan fic. :-)

My life is complete. (or nearly so, because I just heard from a fan of Precinct 13 that she's thinking of cosplaying Alex for Convergence next year. If that happens, I may have to explode from awesome.)

I ended up hanging around afterwards because two of the young women (just for the record, there was one young man) were also journalists who were writing an article about fan fiction for a teen magazine. So, they interviewed me about my opinions and theories about fan fiction. I got kind of deep at one point and might have scared them by talking about the need some of us have to queer our stories. It'll be interesting to see what comes of that.

But, in other news, Mason has caught my stomach bug. On our way to hang out with revolutionaryjo for tea today to talk Free! and SnK, Mason barfed. On the sidewalk, no less. I felt like the world's worst mom, because he'd said his stomach was rough and I dragged him along anyway. On the flipside, I told him he never has to join a fraternity now. He's already experienced hurling into a gutter.

Sheesh.

But, if he's suffering anything like I have. The crampy stomach thing comes and goes. So, hopefully, he won't suffer much. Mine, at least, seems to have settled.