The honeymoon is over as are my delusions of becoming the Rainbow Brite of creative writing teachers. Remember Rainbow Brite, the most colorful girl in the world? If not, you are too young and should stop reading this post and wait for the next. If you do, then you may find the humor in one my student’s…shall we call it an excuse?…for missing class on the day we had our first short story due: he was tired and over slept (our class meets at 10:00 am). Whaa?

As we head into week two I am already forced into the position of rule enforcer. I’m accepting the advice of the MFA program director, who ensures me it is easier to be tough earlier on than halfway through the semester. True slackers will drop the course because they weren’t serious in the first place and you’re better off without them. Invested students will work hard to overcome the deficit and you can choose to reward them at the end of the semester when they’ve earned it.

I know I drew on a parent metaphor in my last post, but I’m going there again because I can’t help but compare the get-tough-early-theory to my philosophy on threatening kids with punishment: it only takes carrying through on the threat once to make the threat a weapon. Fail to carry through and they’ll not only ignore you, but laugh like diabolical little villains while doing it. I’ll have to practice my stern “mom” face before I head into the next class.

Here’s the deal: I’m teaching a university-level creative writing class this semester and one of the assignment’s I’ve given my students is to write a weekly blog post. They can write on the assigned readings or the writing process or both, but it’s got to be every week. The point is to write as much as possible as often as possible because if there is one rule of writing that I have found to be true it is the more you write, the closer you get to discovering what you have to say.

I’m taking my own advice and reviving this dead blog to write about teaching the reading and writing of fiction (and later in the semester poetry). For my part, I hope to discover what insight teaching can bring to my own writing process. The workshop process has been vital in allowing me to gain perspective on my own writing and I believe that teaching can do the same. Objectivity is much easier to achieve when we are observing the work of others, like wondering why the parents of the obnoxiously loud kid at a restaurant don’t take him outside when your own child is under the table rolling around in bits of fallen food.

The first few weeks of class we will be discussing various short stories, trying to pin down what Peter Elbow calls the “center of gravity” for each and identifying the techniques each writer uses to communicate that center to the reader. They have a short short story due this Friday (300-600 words) and I want them to revisit their first drafts before handing them in, see if they can figure out the main point of their lovely prose—if they can’t find it, what chance has the reader got?

I’m looking forward to reading what they come up with.