Witless fear and hug lines

It's easy to forget how incredibly scary it is for a student, for the first time, to lay out a story he or she has written in front of her peers and let them go at it. I often tell students that I was scared witless that first time, and I was 30 years old, at least. What's more, I got filleted. I got ground up and spit out. I got dragged behind a semi for more highway miles than I could count.

And then, two weeks, later, that story got published.

All true. That's what I tell them.

But, like I say, it's not hard to forget.

So this week my students' first stories came in, two of them with e-mailed notes admitting they were scared, witless. Like I say, I'd sort of forgotten. But those two notes helped me remember.

So this year I did something I've never done: I gave them a trial run. I went back into the files and found a story from a dozen years ago, relatively short, somewhat ordinary. I ran off copies, brought them along to class, and handed them out, broke them into groups--they'd, of course, never seen that story before--and told them to come back to class in twenty minutes with their copies well marked. And we'd talk. And we did.

Now that old story had a drug scene, and even though I think it safe to say that my students--on the whole--aren't users, nor do they know the whole drug scene all that well, they obviously knew enough--even from TV--to sense that this story's writer, a decade ago, didn't know much either.

"I don't know about the whole drug thing," one student said, skeptically. "It just doesn't feel right."

We've talked about authority in writing, how crucial it is to be able to sell the givens of a story. If you want to hold on to the fictional dream (John Gardner), you can't have people sensing that you don't know diddly about what you're trying to make us believe you do.

"So how many of you agree?" I said, and most of the 20-some students, somewhat fearful of their own skepticism, reluctantly raised their hands (I have sweet students). But that first comment broke through the reluctance, and condemnation starting rolling down like justice is supposed to. Right before my eyes, a bandwagon appeared.

There was a hangin' coming, I knew, so I told the madding crowd that next week--when their own workshopping begins--the same darn thing is likely to happen, only they'll be looking at the actual writer, not thinking of her in the abstract, because next week the writers R US or whatever.

That quieted the mob into stony silence.

Teaching can be fun. If it wasn't, I'd quit in a minute.

"So," one of them says, meekly, "when we're done, can we have a hug line?"

Simply wonderful moment. I still laugh to see that line on the page.

When I came home that night, I spotted the phone off the hook, which told me my wife had fielded a difficult call--I knew it. And I was right. I heard the story.

What I'm thinking is that maybe the student is right. Maybe there ought to be more hug lines.