NEEDLING

Met up with some new faces this morning. A couple of fellows giving me the low-down, the once-over, the whatever you wantta call it for a writing group I found an ad to while surfing the web.

“What you looking for in this?” They asked.
“Structure, discipline,” I more or less answered in a few more words.
“We got those,” they said.

We talked for a good long while as we looked each other over. The group comprises of about ten folks. One of the two fellows in front of me is one of the two people who started the group a few years ago.

“We don’t mind geniuses, but what we do mind is overly obnoxious people.”
“Well,” I laughed, “I’m no genius, so I got that part down, or at least you won’t have to worry about me being no genius, or acting as one...”
“What brought you to writing?”
“Well…”
“Do you think in French or in English when you’re writing?”
“Well…”
“We had a problem once with this guy who just wrote explicit sex story after explicit sex story. We’re not really interested in that.”
“I don’t write explicit sex stories, so you won’t have to worry about that either. Though I don’t mind sex in a story if it needs to be there. Just like anything.”
“The guy was a bit creepy, basically.”
“The writer?”
“Yeah.”
“Because if I’m writing about a creepy guy, then obviously I hope he’s gonna be a creepy guy in my story. If the guy is creepy about sex, and that’s the one element which makes his character what he is, then I’m gonna have to get creepy and talk about sex in this way…”
“Yes… well, of course…”
“You know, as long as it isn’t entirely gratuitous.”
“And…”
“Sorry… but to answer your question, I started writing when I arrived in this country at the age of ten. My English teacher, and we were living in San Francisco back then, was called Mrs Tanzig, and for some reason she really took an interest in me, and that’s when I started writing poems and stories. For this reason I’ve always written in English, as I was writing for her class, for her basically, even though I spoke very bad to no English back then. I figure back then my English was terrible, now – 23 years later – it’s finally become passable, eventually I’d like it to be good, and then real good. Anyway, my written French sucks, and I’m stuck with English. English is my writing language. Does that answer your question?”
“Yes.”
“So you think in English.”
“No. I think both in English and in French. And that can be a problem because sometimes I use French words while I write in English, when there’s perfectly okay words in English that I should use instead. It’s like sex in a story I guess. If there’s no real reason to use words in a foreign language story-wise, why use them?”

The conversation between the three of us lasted a good long time, and what I’ve written up there is only a VERY PARTIAL section of said conversation, and it in no way reflects the whole conversation though I believe it gives at least an understanding of what was being talked about. A gist of what my morning was about.

I came back here with three short stories – I’d already sent a couple of pieces to the group leader before he agreed to meet me – some examples of critics by various group members, and the format of the group. The next meeting is the eights of September. They seemed like good folks, and I know I need the discipline. Meeting every two weeks, two writers/ short stories per meeting. The writers have to turn in their stories the Friday before the Wednesday meeting, email it to the other members. The other members in turn write a critic of each story, send them to the respective writers only and to the rest of the members after said meeting.