Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

The horror! The horror! What did I learn at a prestigious fiction-writing workshop? That the next time I pick up a pen, I might use it to stab myself.

Article Excerpt
I've wanted to write a novel ever since I started reading, but I wouldn't call it a lifelong dream so much as a demonic possession. My dreams, such as swimming with manatees or ballroom dancing with Brad Pitt, are pleasant, even if they remain unfulfilled. Dreams do not require exorcisms. Although I tried for years to allay this unwelcome urge by remodeling houses or writing for magazines, I always knew--courtesy of a constant, low-grade anxiety--that release would be possible only after I actually wrote one. I did write a murder mystery, an eco-disaster set in Austin filled with transvestites and scuba deaths, but it was so bad it only made the demon more possessive. I tried again: a coming-of-age expose based on my hometown of Bellville and peopled by enough easily identifiable real-life characters to guarantee tons of lawsuits. Then I tried again. About 29,761 words into my latest attempt, a conundrum set in the gothic heart of East Texas, I realized I had to get help, something beyond the books and Web sites on writing that I'd been gobbling up. I also needed distance from what I'd begun to believe was the creativity-sapping flatness and heat of Texas. This is how, despite my do-it-yourself DNA and my native Texan chauvinism, I wound up spending a week last summer at a famous ski resort in the mountains of California getting "workshopped" or as I liked to say, "grouped."

From among the 60 zillion writers' workshops offered in the United States and France, I chose the SquawValley Community of Writers workshop because (1) the application consisted entirely of a writing sample (no listing of nonexistent awards and degrees, no disclosure of advancing age), (2) it's been around for 37 years, (3) there was no mention of journaling or tapping into the monkey...