Creative Nonfiction Workshop

The wine class I teach didn't happen this semester. Poor economy, low enrollment, class canceled.

I could have just taken a break, I suppose, but I decided to improve my writing with a class named Creative Nonfiction Workshop that I wouldn't have been able to take while I was teaching in the same time period. I'm decent at research and the mechanics of writing, but the features that resonate with readers are those with stories, and I lack the tools to consistently write those pieces. I've tried to develop them on my own — I've studied Gay Talese and read through Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and William Blundell's Art and Craft of Feature Writing — but the techniques didn't stick.

My professor divides the class into two conceptual halves: heavy on lecture for the first five weeks and heavy on discussion for the next five. The lecture part helped us craft scenes, paint useful characters, present meaningful dialogue, show — not tell — details, and evoke a feeling in the reader. These are all tools for fiction writers, of course, but they have useful roles in nonfiction as well. In the discussion portion, we spend most of the class critiquing our fellow students' pieces, discussing what works and what needs improving.

I noticed right away that my fellow students generally have more serious topics than I. Most of them have a story to tell and they want to get it out there — the young theater major with the passionate but unconsummated love affair, the woman whose adult son died while in his 20s, the woman writing about a Vietnam vet. I just want to be a better writer. So the class inevitably wanders into topics I'm comfortable with: how to get started, how to finish, and how to revise. But I still find new nuggets in the professor's discussion of these subjects.

I can see the change in my writing. I compare the second piece I'm writing to the first piece, and I see richer details, scenes that establish place and time, and better dialog. I come home from class inspired about new topics and ways to present older topics. I take extensive notes in class.

I'm ready to go back to the wine teaching circuit, but I wish I had the ability to take more writing classes like this one.