two hundred. thirty six.

All of my city classes are done - it's a terrible sadness.

I thought I was doing a terrific job of taking copious notes in every class, but upon glancing back over what I'd written it's just a lot of really cryptic scribbles. I can pick out maybe one or two words that might have some significance, as well as fragments of book titles or authors. I continue to tell myself that I'll take the time to decode it soon enough.

I need to get better at note-taking and general organization of written materials. I discovered that for 8 weeks of classes I used 3 different notebooks. Whilst recently shuffling around the study I found a stack of additional notebooks, all of them somewhere around half full, none of them cohesive. I'd start the first part of a story in one book, jot down bullet points in another, and write out half sentences or more notes in other books. If this is a reflection of how I go about organizing other facets of my life, it's a miracle I can function at all. 

My creative writing teacher always likened writing to cooking - you just have to know the recipe. We all suspected that his analogy had more to do with the fact that he never had anything to eat before class and talked about food as often as he talked about writing. Have I told you how eccentric he was? When he spoke, most of his L's became W's. I tried to write down a sample sentence for you, but alas, it too is also scribbles. I can tell you that he used "like" as a filler word a lot. A wot. Wike, a wot. 

Anyhow, back to writing as cooking, sometimes I didn't want a recipe, I just wanted to mess around and throw a meal together. I didn't want to talk about what made that meal unique based on the ingredients and the recipe. He would constantly point out weird little things that we would unintentionally do in our writing, and then tell us to keep doing that. This was both interesting and wildly unhelpful. How to continue to write subtly? Doesn't the very fact that I now know that I write subtly ruin everything? I can never be subtle again.

I want to know what makes something good but I also don't. 

I always want to know what makes something bad, but he would never say. He would question the purpose of words or sentences, but never outright tell us something didn't work. He would leave us to figure it out for ourselves. Very rarely he would scratch out unnecessary words. I loved going through and finding words scratched out. Good riddance!  

Needless to say, I enjoyed it tremendously. 

He left us with a bunch of really inspirational, hokey statements. It was the best.