8/17/06 Going to a Workshop

Jesus called Brian liked to disrupt church services. It was part of the reason that I believed in him, whatever he was. “It’s so diluted,” he would say while pulling open the door to the church lobby. A different church every week. This week the unfortunate souls at the First Methodist Baptist Church of Christ were going to be privy to his rage, and mine too, I guess, since I was tagging along. “First Methodist Baptist,” he spat, “These people can’t even make up their minds.” On he marched toward the doors, behind which held the dutiful, if confused, churchgoers.
He thrust the doors open with a bang, and rushed up the aisle. I rushed after him, unaware of what really, I was supposed to be doing.
“Attention, Meth Addicts,” he screamed. I caught the reference too late and after I had whispered loudly, “They’re Christians, not drug addicts.”
Jesus called Brian laughed over his shoulder, he would tell me later that I had added a genius comical touch to the event.

This writing comes from a writing workshop I went to at Barnes and Noble once. They would have this workshop once a week and I thought it seemed like a good opportunity to get some feedback on my work. I soon discovered that you probably shouldn’t just find random strangers to do this sort of thing. It’s not a good idea to find all of your best friends either because they are just going to tell you how much they love everything. The reason that you shouldn’t go to workshops with strangers is that you have no idea what they are writing or what kind of writers they are. It turns out that these people were romance writers.

The way that this workshop worked was that they would give us all little prompts and then we would go around the table and write about these things. Jesus called Brian was a part of a story that I was working on, or that I had been working on in some form or another since my freshman year of college. It never really evolved much and I think that I moved past it, though he does show up from time to time if I need something exciting to happen. I don’t remember what the prompts were exactly, I just know that there were three of them. I don’t think that anything really important came out of this group. There was no criticism what-so-ever. You would just read what you had just wrote out loud and everyone would not and say “That’s interesting” before they would read their romance story. No matter what the prompt was, it could fit into the plot of their current project.

There was also an eleven year old there. I think that was the weirdest thing about this whole group. The eleven year old. She shouldn’t have been there. I understand if she wants to be a writer and this is something that she finds fun, but a person can’t write the kinds of things that they really want to write if there is an eleven year old hanging around. Actually, one of the prompts inspired me to write a story that involved drug use. One of the characters sat on a bed rolling a joint and talking about Amsterdam. I got a lot of terse looks for that one. People were motioning with their eyes towards the little girl.

It was the first time and last time I went to that workshop (or really, I think that we should call it a group because nothing was really work-shopped). I couldn’t stand the idea of having my writing critiqued by someone who hadn’t reached puberty yet. I don’t write for children. I also didn’t want to listen to anymore chit chat about romance novels or the romance novel industry, which might be completely different than the book industry seeing as they will sometimes just hand you the plot and you don’t have to think about it at all. Maybe I was being snobby. I don’t care. I still wouldn’t join a group like that. I have other people read my work but I think that they are people who understand better the things that I am trying to do with my writing. You have to be able to trust the people that you trust with your work. It’s redundant, but true.