Beginning at the End

 As mentioned previously, I'm gathering thoughts for my online class at the Loft. 

I should be thinking about world-building, since that's the subject I have open in the other tab, but I'd previously discussed beginnings--you know, how to hook a reader with a snazzy opening line or starting in the middle of the action. Now, I'm wondering if I should record some thoughts about beginnings, in particular, how critical it is to end as strongly as you start.

I'm not sure how much I actually know about that, since I'm weirdly terrible at endings--at least when I'm writing the first drafts of them.  By the time my ends are in books, they've been through several drafts, including an editorial one.  But, when I'm first finishing a book, I'm often just rushing towards the deadline at full speeds and then stop. My writers group will always tell me "the ending feels rushed."

They're always right.

There is at least one book of mine where I know that I dropped what was cool about the opening completely and kind of never touched on it again.  I don't want to name names, because it's also one of my more wildly successful books? But, if as my colleague Kelly McCullough says, you should start with a problem statement and then end the book with the solution to that problem, I kind of never did that with this book. So, clearly that's not critical to a book's success or failure.

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I don't know if this blog post has any real thoughts to impart. I'm just trying to get back in the habit of thinking about writing and writing about writing. 

Nostalgia

 I've been returning to this blog a lot in the past few days because I'm prepping a class at the Loft.  

I'm not really here to sell the class to you, but it's asynchronous, so if you are not local to me, but would like to take a class from me, the link is here: https://loft.org/classes/over-transom-sff-intermediate-writers

The reason why I've been thinking about this blog (and its sister blog over at Wyrdsmiths) is that I actually wrote down a lot of my thinking about writing here over the years. I mean, a lot of it is VERY old. I'm finding odd gems from 2004 and thereabouts, but it's still kind of fascinating to see how much I recorded over the years.  

This class prep has been killing me a little bit because there is NO live aspect, no Zoom. So, I need to have everything I want to say about writing written down. That's not entirely fair. I do have the option on the program that they've given me (writer.ink) to embed video and audio tracks, which I do intend to do, but the course is intended to be a website--albeit a very complex and interactive one. 

Those of you who have met me know that I'm not actually very good at being straight-forward. I don't think in terms of A to B to C. I'm much more organic, flowing from A to B, but then going off on a tangent on Q, then riff on YELLOW, and then go back to... was I at D? Hopefully, it was entertaining live? When students could raise their hands and say, "Um, I think you skipped C?" I'm not sure how it is all translating into text. 

I did download an app that lets me record voice on my phone and save it as an .mp3.  So, now I can be one of those people you see going for walks talking loudly to themselves. I also bought a license for a pro-video recording software so I can edit any videos I record of lectures.  With luck, this will give the student a sense of who I am and how I think? 

I dunno. I may come back here, though, in the course of working on this class design and write out some of my thoughts about writing again. 

I don't think anyone still checks this blog, but it is still here so I might as well use it.