Finding My Rhythm

It’s 4:00 p.m. on Friday, August 4, 2017, and I just finished up my latest salsa lesson. Now that I’m living by myself, I figured learning salsa would be good way for me to meet new people. My biggest takeaway after seven lessons is the amount of listening that’s involved. Salsa is all about timing, and if you’re not in tune with the music, then you'll eventually end up dancing off beat. This is exactly where I am right now in both my salsa lessons and, more importantly, my writing.

I entered the summer with a goal of making significant progress on my book edits, but that hasn’t gone according to plan. The past two months were filled with all sorts of distractions that kept me unfocused and off-balance. This background noise made it difficult to tune into Maven’s story, resulting in one misstep after another each time I sat down to write.

Although my writing slowed down, my reading actually revved up on account of an eight-week summer writing course I recently completed. The course was offered through the Writing Workshops of Dallas, an independent writing school founded by my instructor Blake Kimzey. I enrolled because I wanted to join a community of writers, and I figured a refresher course would also kick start the editing process.

There were nine students in the class ranging from millennials to middle-aged adults. Our instructor Blake was a 30-something-year-old father of three whose likeable personality and witty commentary alone were worth the price of admission. The fact that he has an MFA from UC-Irvine and is currently shopping his first novel for publication was an added bonus.

Overall, the course was far more intensive than I had expected. It consisted of scheduled text readings, classroom discussions, and a workshop component that required us to read three of our classmates’ stories each week and provide them with a one-page typed critique. The workshop process is a unique experience and one I hadn’t participated in since my freshman year in college when I took my first creative writing class.

Back then, my college advisor suggested I take the class to increase my odds at being accepted into the highly competitive School of Journalism and Mass Communication at CU-Boulder. Her advice paid off: not only was I accepted to the journalism program my sophomore year, but the class also helped me break out of my literary shell and become the writer I am today.

I realized then that workshopping can be an emasculating process but one designed to help me stay on beat with my writing. For Blake’s class, it was our job to read the scheduled submissions and return the following week prepared to discuss. The author isn’t allowed to talk in a workshop setting. He or she must sit in silence like a fly on the wall and listen to the constructive criticism of the others.

“Listening” is an important quality of any writer because it helps you better understand your characters and your audience. It requires a level of concentration that has never come easy to me or to the main character of my novel, Maven, for that matter. As an example, Maven’s inherent curiosity as a raven makes him susceptible to distraction and leads to his short attention span.

Call it a character flaw, which in fiction is best described as a “limitation, imperfection, problem, or deficiency.” We all have them and so do the main characters of any good story. As for me, my short attention span has always been the product of an active imagination.

It’s why my very patient salsa teacher always reminds me to stay focused, and it’s also the reason she makes me count my steps aloud when we dance. Her goal each class is to “get me out of my head” so I stay present in the moment. If not, she knows my mind will wander and my feet will follow.

The good news for both me and Maven is that character flaws are generally overcome by the end of a story. It’s up to me to tune into the literary music of Maven's story because, like a popular salsa song, the best fiction stories are those with a beat readers can dance to. My attention is finally back where it needs to be, and it’s about time I take the lead and get back to finding my rhythm.

Follow me on Instagram at @Joshua_Maven or @HonchotheVan, on Twitter @MaventheRaven or Facebook at Facebook/TheLastImperial.