March 26th, 2025

So there I was, disapproving of a student. We were in the "big classroom," where light and noise rushed past the potted plants and through the frosted glass partition behind us. I usually avoid this room because it makes me feel I'm conducting class under a waterfall, but my problem wasn't feng shui.

"What happened to the script you were working on?"

I've learned to take most students as they come, but this one presented an unfamiliar challenge. She wanted help writing fiction, which is closer to my heart than English grammar and vocabulary. And, just a few years older than my daughter, she seemed to prefigure the dread shadow of the teenager. I'll call her Daniela.

Daniela creates short animations about characters from a particular horror movie. All of them were molested as children and a whole lot of them are gay. She should stand up straighter and not spend so much time on her phone. And she doesn't do her homework. I say, "Read these three pages of Save the Cat" or "Come to me next week with some ideas about how the protagonist could be responsible for this story's resolution," and I get nothing.

This week, I'd planned to just read through her current project, but again, Daniela had dropped it.

"Why?" I asked, thinking can't you follow through with anything? And do I have to invent another lesson on the fly again? "Why didn't your last project work?"

It was supposed to be a list of different kinds of love for a video on Valentine's Day. "I got eros and agape,” she said, “but for some reason, I got stuck on storge."

"What's storge?"

"It's Greek. Like, 'Found Family.'"
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Ugh. Found Family. What I’d like to see is more fiction advising audiences to fix their real families instead of pretending you can trade them in for better models. I didn't say any of that.

"Have you every experienced that kind of relationship?" I asked.

"Uh, no."

"Do you know anyone who has?" I thought I was being gentle and Socratic. "Maybe that's why you're stuck. Because you know Found Family isn't real."

"Well, it's a trope.”

"Trope is one word for it, but another is cliché."

I might as well have said all that crotchety judgement after all. Daniela folded her arms and turned her face away in a pose of defense and denial.

Rather than following up with a lecture about writing from experience, or just sitting there so we could fume at each other, I asked Daniela about the worldbuilding of her stories. She was happy to talk, and make up new lore as she talked, but I was both worried and annoyed. Is this what I had to look forward to with my daughters? This sullen incuriosity? This indulgent wallowing in victimhood? Are my daughters going to stay up all night watching disturbing videos and then fail to make their own?

All of which was a defensive shell around my real fear, which was I was wasting Daniela’s time. It seemed as if she would get just as much good out of brainstorming with her friends, or bouncing ideas off a pet rock. I even asked her if my criticism and scrutiny was killing her ideas. "No," she said, "I always give up on most of my projects."

Fine, but I still wasn't happy with how I was conducting these classes. I'd never taught creative writing before, and I could tell I was spending a lot of mental energy getting in my own way. I asked around for advice, and as always, Paul Venet hit me with the good, hard stuff: "when I taught drawing, I didn't get up in front of someone and teach from a position of authority."

I didn't like the scorn I heard in his voice. I like the idea of authority; I think it would be nice to have some, some day. Did I present my profile to Paul and fold my arms? Maybe so, because he said, "Of course, when I was in front of a big lecture hall, that was a different thing. If you've got fifty students, you stand in front of them and tell them what you gotta tell them. But with one student or a small group, you don't." He told me to speak from experience, and to be patient.

Daniela's next class came around, and here she was with yet another new project. I listened and took notes on her characters' magic powers and their phobias. Once she'd wound down, I said, "Working on lore is a lot of fun. It's like candy for me. The problem is I can have too much candy. I just go around and around inventing lore without actually telling a story." You, gentle readers, may have noticed.

"Yeah," she said. "I do."

As homework, I gave Daniela the assignment of keeping a log of her writing. Where she writes and when and what. She didn't do it, but she scribbled something in her notebook five minutes before class, which we used as the start of a conversation about writing habits and patterns. The week after that, she brought in a script we could read together.

It's hard to get out of your own way. You want to be listened to, followed, and liked. You want, in fact, people to pay for your wisdom. The problem is that you need to have some wisdom first. I’m working on it.

I did some brainstorming this month about how English spelling might disconnect further from phonetics and evolve into a logographic script.

And I wrote up the third poem in Ancient Thracian from my novel Wealthgiver: The Nikolaic Theophany. My favorite line: Dégmōn iadí. Mē / Ápseran pouteté. “The Host will ride upon the ground. / Do not complain. And turn around.”

And I read some things

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Funnier than Anna Karenina, more insightful than Vanity Fair. I wish it had focused more tightly on Katherine and Dorothy, whose relationship is the sweet counterpoint to the bitter ones with foolish husbands and untrustworthy peers. The conversation between Dorothy and her befuddled old husband is tragically perfect. I wish there was a sharper climax, though, and the superior husband isn't drawn with nearly the detail as the bad one. I definitely need to read it again.

Into the Looking Glass by John Ringo
Fun and un-serious events occur after portals open up to a whole bunch of alien planets. There were some big ideas – one right at the end and seemingly attached to nothing. I guess, to the sequel? I wish Ringo had treated this book as a first draft and written another that was better thought out. General Pta-pta-pta needed a lot more screen time.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
As I was reading this to my kids, I kept thinking of Hayao Miyazaki. There's a scene where little princes Sophie and her foolish nurse are fleeing home as dusk falls and the goblins emerge. I could see Miyazaki’s blooby wobbly-outlined style. I really wonder if he based Sheeta and Pazu on Sophie and Curdy.

The Miranda Consipracy by James L. Cambias
Cambias used to be one of the authors whose books I bought on sight. I still think about The Initiate and its meditation on moral desserts. The Godel Operation wasn’t as thoughtful, but it still had something to say the godlike-AI conversation and how not to be an egotist. The sequel, thought, had a hollow space inside it where there should have been an answer to the question, “what’s the point if your civilization is a sideshow to posthuman AIs?” In this, the third book, that hollow has grown enormous. There’s some action, some sex, some death, and none of it matters. I’ll pass on the next book.

On Christian Doctrine by Augustine of Hippo
On this, my first reading, I spent most of my time appreciating what a good language teacher Saint Augustine was. I’m going to use his “the snail has no voice” example in a class one of these days. And I’ll read it again.
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Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
I enjoyed this book until the narrator went to jail and mended her ways. I put it down at that point, but after a few months I picked it back up and finished it. I would have liked a sharper edge to this story. A wrong harder to forgive or atone for. But I do appreciate the highlight of a bad mental habit: seeing your money as a pile of treasure that you can only deplete.

See you next month