It’s my husband’s fault I don’t have a column this week, but I’m not complaining. I’m actually pretty happy about what had me distracted.

Every Thursday night, Geoff teaches a novel-writing class in the newspaper’s conference center. It’s an 8-week course, and I wanted badly to get in. Over the past few years, I’ve started a few novels, carried around ideas for novels, read books about writing novels, but still floundered with my own. I needed a class, but there’s never anything offered in this area, so I had to find a great writer, marry him, and then convince him to move to town and start teaching.

Geoff prefers to keep his classes small, usually stopping with 12 students, so once he told me he’d signed up 16, I thought I was out, but he apparently got tired of my begging/pleading/whining and let me in.

I’ve been having such a great time in this class. He breaks this huge, intimidating undertaking down into do-able steps. He’s especially good at where to start a novel and how to develop characters, which even though I get it, I’m still having a hard time putting what I’m learning into practice. Action sequences I can do, but descriptive settings and characters–not so good. My head is too caught up in the story to stop long enough to include details, which he says I can add later so I’m trying not to let that slow me down.

Last weekend, I got started writing and couldn’t stop. I even got out of bed in the middle of the night just to add a few paragraphs (that I later deleted).  Hopefully, I’ll figure out how to do both kinds of writing–columns and the novel–at the same time. I don’t want to stop doing either. This is so completely different from anything I’ve attempted before.

I’d love to try to organize Charleston’s writing community, to get writing groups started and maybe even stir up some competition between the groups. Maybe someday…

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