Forward motion: signing up for the rest of my life.

This fall I'm taking a break from the local choir I've sung with since 2000 and will take a memoir-writing class in its stead. Me and memoir? Well, I'm definitely too young to write my "memoirs" in the famous-celebrity sense, but I have to admit the explosion of first-person allegedly-true or partially-true or 75%-lie accounts fascinates me.

I don't have any glorious (or vainglorious) intentions in taking this class. I want to work on my prose skills, and that's about as modest as I can make it. I've made a few forays into what I want to do with the two music appreciation mini-essays I've put on here. Another fervent hope is to keep the writing juice supplied to where it doesn't feel like an insurmountable task to do some on a semi-regular basis. A third is, simply, to dig into some more personal stuff that needs to be written, much of which I wouldn't feel comfortable putting even here, since I know I have some readers.

In the past I have written a few short stories. My fiction skills are, shall we say, underdeveloped. I tip my dusty cap to all y'all who write short stories, because I think they're the hardest thing ever. I have a fondness for the quotidian--an overfondness, actually--and my chief weakness has always been forward motion, making the story frickin' do something on the page. So maybe memoir/personal essays/remembrances/whatever will be a workable way back into prose.

There's something refreshingly workmanlike about writing prose when the writing goes well. Journalists are perhaps the most workmanlike simply out of necessity. But it seems like progress in a prose piece can be measured more defiinitely, or one can set benchmarks along the way a little more readily than with, say, a poem. I don't ever remember setting the goal of writing one more stanza, say, or finding two more unusual end-rhymes before the night was done. Procrastination cuts across all genres, of course, but--I don't know, I equate writing prose to solving a puzzle, in a way. Poetry just doesn't have that feel for me, somehow; it's more like buffing one piece of the puzzle rather than finding out the design of the whole puzzle.

And that's as far as I want to go with that. A theorist I am not.