First Things First

For the last eight weeks I've been taking a creative non-fiction class, one of the offerings from U of T's School of Continuing Studies. The instructor was Michael Harris (same guy whose book I mentioned in the last post), and there were about ten other students in the class, ranging from recent grads, like myself, to people a little further along in life. Tonight we had the final session, and I can easily say that I'm going to miss our weekly gatherings.

The experience was kind of perfect for me at this point in my life; a good way to flex the creative muscles and set me on a path. The class was my first real step in the long process that is (hopefully) going to be my career. At the start of 2014, I wrote down a list of things I wanted to get done in that year, and it turned out to be fairly effective. Graduate: check. Backpack through South America: check. Learn Spanish: kind-of check. And so on. Each goal had a set of smaller, bite-sized goals, and from those I would choose the easiest and most immediate step. The idea is that you work from one bite-sized goal to another, and at the end you've done the main thing that you set out to do. Based on the success of last year, I thought I'd try the same thing again. But this time around I didn't put a list together till March, and instead of backpacking through South America, I want a career.  

So I took a class on creative non-fiction. And it was good! I got some advice, and I read some key pieces from the last half century that I wouldn't have thought to read on my own (Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra has a Cold," Jimmy Breslin's "Digging JFK grave was his honor"). I learned that I write best in the morning, after coffee and before breakfast, and that I shouldn't expect to earn a hell of a lot of money from this. I wrote something personal and allowed it to be read by my peers, critiqued, workshopped— a process that was both sickening and exhilarating. 

The task, now, is to stay the course. Keep writing (obviously), and start sending that writing to people who will pay you for it. Now that I'm done the class, I now have a piece that I can maybe convince somebody to publish. And if that doesn't work out, you know where you can find it.