MoodyTunes

I bailed on my latest writing workshop.

Online workshops are strange beasts. They’re enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but you have to make sure you don’t lose track of your goals. It’s easy to get caught up with writing exercises, online chats, reading your classmates’ work, and other assignments. You dedicate ten weeks of your time to a class, and if you’re not careful you’ll look up at the end with about two weeks of your own work and a stack of other writers’ first drafts. Eventually, you have to ask yourself if that’s an acceptable outcome after two or three months of effort.

I won’t get too far into that discussion because every workshop experience is different. Let’s just say I’m ready to focus on my own work, I’m selfish, and I couldn’t find the commitment to spend the majority of my time reviewing other work and churning out writing exercises. This ain’t a democracy, it’s not a collaborative effort, and sometimes you have to shut out all the people telling you that there are thirteen better ways to describe how Chester Waddington finds his dead hamster and drops his plate of cranberry sauce.

One thing that bothered me in workshops past was seeing my stories morph into something I didn’t like or recognize. They turned into bad impersonations of authors whose books we were reading. I changed elements I never wanted to change based on class feedback. I lost my way. I lost my voice. There’s a real danger in seeking approval from a pack of strangers.

I’m thinking the same thing you are: Let’s completely overanalyze this! Approval from a pack of strangers. I put that thought on the back burner, celebrated my workshop tuition refund by buying wine and whiskey (hey, that means I’m a writer for sure, right?), and kicked back to watch American Idol. The judges listened to a young woman who walked up and belted out an exact replica of a Celine Dion song, right down to the strange pronunciation of words like “love” (”lerrrrrrrv”) and what I once heard Phil Collins call “excessive embroidery.” When she was done with her mimicry the judges said she sounded great, she was moving on to Hollywood, but they also said something that resonated with me: Throw out your records. Stop listening to what everyone else is doing. Find your voice, and bring that with you for the next round.

This may signal my doom. I may never achieve anything after offending the gods of writing, life, and sensibility by saying this, but that American Idol moment made complete sense. It made sense for my writing…not that I should stop reading altogether, but that I should focus more on my development than worshiping at the altar of any published work I can find.

And you can expand that idea: What is mimicry, and what is you? It made sense on a completely different level. There are times in life when you start sounding like everyone else. You start writing like everyone else. Laughing. Running. Playing. Or worse, you stop exploring those things you love because nobody else pays a lick of attention to them. Cheesy movies. Trashy books. Saturday morning cartoons. Pottery. Poetry. Puttering in your garden. Putting around the golf course. Surfing. Sleeping.

I don’t know if this makes any sense at all. If you asked me yesterday, “Hey, Alex, do you think you can find something useful in an American Idol auditon?” I’d have laughed and thrown bricks at you until you begged forgiveness. But that’s how my brain works sometimes..

Throw out your records.