Earlier this year my wife Jen gifted me a year long membership for MasterClass.com. If you’re not familiar with the site it’s basically a series of video lectures on various topics, usually by famous celebrity types. You can learn comedy from Steve Martin, directing from Ron Howard, how to cook from Gordon Ramsey, how to play tennis from Serena Williams, etc. The roster of people they’ve lined up hosting these lessons is pretty deep.
I have a feeling the impetus of Jen getting me this was for the author lectures. It was her way to help push me back into giving writing a go. She knows how much I like my stories, whether in book form or screen form. Perhaps she thinks I have some stories of my own to tell.
It’s not entirely without precedent. I do possess a Bachelors of Arts in English earned from Northern Illinois University back in ‘96. Problem is, that was really the last time I was serious about writing. I knew back then a career in writing wasn’t going to happen, so I stopped reading novels and started reading stuff like “Learn HTML in 7 Days” and things like that. Web design started out as a hobby for me, and it turned into a 22+ year career. So I left one creative outlet for another, all in the spirit of paying off student loans, cars, mortgages, etc. There were days I fully expected a representative of the NIU English Department to show up on my door asking me to return my degree due to lack of use post graduation.
Occasionally I’d pick up a novel or a biography, and even less occasionally I’d pick up a pen and a notebook. And that was my biggest problem – the time interval between brief spurts of inspiration was too few and far between for it to ever amount to anything substantial. Once I lost the structure of following along the rhythms of a semester schedule, I lost my discipline.
And that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned so far with the MasterClass – discipline. I started out with Neil Gaiman’s “The Art of Storytelling” class and am two-thirds through Margaret Atwood’s “Creative Writing” class and one of the common things they both say is that to get better at writing you have to keep writing. Every day. Make time, set aside time. I remember reading Stephen King’s Book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” last year, and while I enjoyed the autobiographical parts of the book more than his chapters about his writing process and advice, I do remember even he said the same thing. Keep writing, every day. Get a routine. Stick to it.
Time. It’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve failed in the past. I just didn’t commit to it enough.
Which is why I’m starting this journal back up. Trying to commit time to write something. Anything. At least once a day to get in the habit of setting aside the time (hell, I’m already a day behind. This should have been posted yesterday). Who knows if I’ll post each entry or not, or what I’ll think about writing on any given day. But it’s the effort I’m trying to make good on. Perhaps something I write here will be a seed that grows into something larger. I have some ideas. Whether or not they’re ideas that transform into anything tangible, that’s another question.
We’ll see how it goes.
As for what I think about the MasterClasses I’ve been taking so far, perhaps those will be another entry on another day. I will say so far they’re fascinating and wonderfully produced (although with any lecture, I have to digest them in small parts or else they can start to lose me if I watch for too long at one time). Funniest thing so far is I did get almost entirely through Gaiman’s class before I realized there were accompanying workbooks, so that was an oversight on my part. And I wish I’d had Margaret Atwood as an English professor back in college. She has a humor about her that pops up now and then. And when she makes herself laugh, I get a kick out of that.
