the other side of the equation

well tonight was my first short fiction class.

i arrived on time, ok i was 2 minutes late, it was the first class i didn't think it would matter much one way or the other. as i walked in i saw the old desks with the arm outstretched awaiting my writing pen and i felt worried...would i fit? i slowly lowered myself into the seat as the names on the list were called and luckily i made it in. barely. mental note, this maybe be a problem in 6 weeks. bridges and crossing, time and place. we'll see if i make it that long.

that was foreshadowing. we didn't learn about foreshadowing tonight. tonight was about character development. a picture was placed on the stark white board and we were instructed to write out point form adjectives about the character. i heard him say adjectives, it soon became evident that maybe others did not. i wrote down 6-7, i didn't give it a lot of thought. i worked all day, this is the first class. i forgot to warm my brain up on the way and i was expecting something a little more...relaxed? as i thought of further "adjectives" to describe the uptight somber mean looking man on the board my mind began to wander to the 17 other people in the room with me. why are there so many? why are they all so young? why does that girls pin say i heart my vagina? i sensed something as i looked around. maybe it was the furious movement of pens next to my stagnant utensil but i felt confidence in the air. it made me nervous.

so the time was up, the pens put down and we were told that he would go around the room and write down the responses with temporary ink on the expansive white surface at the front of the room. we should find that our responses overlap here, we should find some common denominators we were told. but life seems to always be full of surprises for me. first batter up sits up talls and states i am sorry but i think i did the exercise wrong. oh? yes i wrote more than adjectives, i think i got carried away. that's ok, please tell us what you have. i think he was a russian philosopher in the 19th century who collected old oil paintings of fruit stills and loved to play the harmonica. his favourite jacket was tweed with a slight patch worn on his upper right sleeve from the time he helped his son with whom is he is distant move his wife and baby girl who is cholic into their new apartment on west 57th avenue. i am laughing, well more like smiling broadly. is this for real? we had 3 minutes to write stuff down and she knows his whole life story? oh well she is confident and loves her vagina, she is an anomaly. next? he collects rare orchids which he tends to with care in his greenhouse he built from scratch, despite losing a hand in the war, right after his wife died in a tragic car accident. they had fought on the phone only moments before. gulp. next? he frequents the astoria on park avenue where the bartender always knows his drink but has never known his name. next? he is russian and comes from a military background, his friends call him bull and he only smokes cuban cigars and drinks 20 year old scotch. he bets on horses on the weekends without his wife knowing, he is frequently unfaithful. next. next. next.

me. did no one understand this? should i make some flowery shit up as well or should i give my adjectives, dare i be the only one that blurts out stable, successful, prudent, difficult, unlikable....i had a moment of pause and then i thought to hell with this. i said my peace and it was documented on the now overflowing 6 column long board. as you can imagine the overlapping was sketchy at best. everyone had some fantasy this guy lived in and it would seem impossible that they could overlap, considering there were no adjectives. i sat back and thought to myself, what have i done?

so you think this would be it right? i mean how bad could it get? next he explains that the exercise was to make us look at the obvious (ummm i am not sure that worked..none of that was obvious to me, it wasn't obvious to anyone. did he sell flowers or bonds? did he have kids or was he gay? everyone was undecided) and that in fact we were now going to write a 1-2 page story about the sheet of paper at the front but we were not allowed to include any of the descriptions on the board. as you can imagine this is a tall order considering the fact that he was perhaps every nationality on earth, well except for asian although i think one person said he lived in hong kong and did every profession possible. so what now. and did you say 15 minutes? my brain takes that long to boot.

so i panic.

am i going to have to read this aloud? will we each be singled out to present our 15 minute pieces of glory. i spent the first 5 minutes thinking about how i could get out of this. the next five convincing myself i can do this and the last five writing a story about an old retired man whose wife signed him up for a short fiction class so that she could get him out of the house on thursday nights. in classc he felt inadequate, desperate and completely ill equipped. the man in the picture became the man in the story who out of incompetence became me. the math on this was easy and it all added up to shit.

then we took a break.

we all came back and i got the distinct impression that i may have been the only one in the room worried that we may have to read these aloud. everyone looked almost as though they wanted to. i was determined that my response would be "i think i'll pass, but thank you" if i was called upon. luckily it never came to that. in fact very little was said about the story again. instead we were all handed a photocopied story that he is fond of, it was a nice little ditty about hippapotomuses and a sick aunt. it had punch and poignancy and wit. we never discussed it just read it aloud and then we were told to write a story for next week that comes from a personal experience for which we have an emotional attachment.

only next week will prove what we have to do with it.

maybe i should have taken a self help course on confidence first, or at least learned how to love my vagina. hindsight. 20. 20.