It is hard
to stand up and talk coherently for over an hour.
You can
over-prepare and still forget everything you planned to say and start babbling when the brain gets
tired.
Not as many
people have read "Pride & Prejudice" as someone like me assumes.
('Someone like me'? Who dat?) It should be no cause for astonishment, then, to
discover that few harbor an abiding admiration for the novel's famous first
line.
There is no
good time to drive to Cape Cod on a Friday in August.
If you state
in a pre-course email 'Feel free to read these excerpts and print out copies to
refer to in class,' some will feel free not to.
Your
printer will run out of both paper and inkjet the morning of the course when it
occurs to you to print out extra copies.
You think
it would be a good idea to listen to relaxing music or an inspiring piece of
literature on the long stop-and-go drive to the writer's conference. But none
of your inspiring music has made it into the car and the book on CDs you took out
from the library is a piece of junk.
The city of
Hyannis has many roads, both large and small, that serve utterly no purpose in
taking you to your destination.
Many other
people are having a busy August weekend.
It is very
easy to allow very important statements prepared in advance to slip from your
memory when the time has come to declare them to the world. Or have I said this
before?
Nobody even
knows anybody who has ever heard of "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia
Woolf. It is easy to forget to ask, "Have anyone seen the movie 'The
Hours'?"
At least
one other person in the universe can match the sentence "Many years later,
as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that
distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" to the novel
"One Hundred Years of Solitude." Whew.
On the
other hand, few people are impressed by the connection between the famous first
sentence "All
happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"
by Tolstoi and the sentence "The place where you grow up is always the
most boring place in the world. The place you leave behind is a source of
endless fascination"... by, ahem, yours truly.
When the Writing
Conference session you have been preparing for for weeks is over, you will feel
an astonishing sensation of relief.
At the session's
end some participants will come up to thank you for the course, including one
or two you didn't expect it from, and say complimentary things about your
choice of excerpts.
Some of the
others will sneak out the door before the session is actually over. These will unfortunately
will miss the opportunity to fill out the course evaluation forms, on account of
being gone by the time the instructor passes them out.
When one of
the more engaged participants raises his hand and observes, "So is it
correct to sum up what you're saying as 'you only get one chance to make a
first impression?'" you will think hard for a moment and then respond with
an enthusiastic "Yes! Yes! See you all next year!"
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