In the last few years I took up fiction writing in a group down in the Belfast area where we used to live. I figured that after writing technical stuff for a couple decades I could take on fiction too. I spend a lot of time driving, a little less now that I cut my commute from 50 to 10 minutes, and I listen to books on tape. Mostly adventure, mystery, or crime fiction. I am on a Dick Francis kick right now. He has a nice simple formula that entertains. I also carry a voice recorder so I can keep all those ideas I get while driving and listening. Periodically I download and type in those little insights for future use.
One writing goal is to create entertaining fiction in the first person. Another is to explore voices for entertaining, persuasive, and informative non-fiction that I can use at the DEP. We publish a weekly article called “In your Backyard” that often aims at changing behavior around an environmental issue. This week it talks about the Pacific plastic garbage gyre, a slowly moving whirlpool twice the size of Texas and 30 feet thick of plastic stuff. The piece goes on to encourage the Maine citizen to recycle plastic.
I would like to learn and refine skill in this creative non-fiction class to meet both these goals.
You have a problem. You want to write fiction but you have little time to devote outside of work and family. You write lots of technical stuff at work. You write a piece for the weekly column at work but it comes out really dry and technical, not the way you wanted at all. You have the time to make creative non-fiction at work but you need some new voices, different approaches to grab attention. So you join up John Goldfine's class and you're off and writing.
He's one of those would-be writers with a few chapters of a novel in the current equivalent of the bottom desk drawer, the thumb drive. The words can be easily cut here and pasted there into some other work so he saves them. He heard that a writer should start the morning with 1000 words, then move on to the rest of the day. When he hits that goal he'll probably be 65 year old. At that age it will be a great hobby but he hopes to be surfing a little when the writing is done.
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Anthony Trollope famously began his day with a few solid hours of writing. Then he put in a full day as a post office bureaucrat.
He would stop writing when the clock told him it was time, even in the middle of a word, and when he finished a novel, if there was still time, he would keep writing--beginning the new novel! That is discipline....
The rest of us do what we can.
If you worry that stuff is too dry and technical, you might want to try shaking yourself up. Write all in lower case one day, put on loud music, plan to write faster for 20 minutes and then go nonstop without thinking. Try writing technical stuff nontechnically--e.g., follow the life cycle of a piece of packaging from the oil pit to the refinery to the factory to the kitchen counter to the Pacific gyre--from the point of view of the plastic itself. Or try a Dick Francis pastiche for a few pages: it's not only his formula that's simple, his style too lends itself to imitation. And do the pastiche over a technical subject!
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