How am I supposed to follow that?!?

Okay, so I'm going to Valpo to speak to a class of creative writing and English majors in a couple months -- yea, my kind of people! Not a one of us would probably be able to figure out a tip at a restaurant without much discussion and possibly a calculator. I'm kidding, but seriously, you should see the writers at Corporate America when we go out to lunch together. It's like brain surgery, trying to figure out how much everyone owes : ) That's half the fun of it too, laughing at ourselves! We can spell "gratuity," but figuring it out is something else!

Anyway, in the course of an email exchange with one of my professors who is setting everything up, I learn that Tim O'Brien has just visited and offered his perspective on writing. Okay, how do I follow that?!? Tim O'Brien is this huge, award-winning writer. In college, I wrote a paper on one of his books, The Things They Carried, which is an awesome, if not sad and kind of scary, book. At least if my memory serves.

So forgive me, at the moment, I'm having a major panic attack about following Tim O'Brien. Oh, not literally, of course, but as in the next visiting writer that these students will talk to about writing. EEEK.

Okay, deep breath. Yes, I probably know some things that I can share, bits of information that they will find useful in some way. Right? Right?!? I mean, I don't think Tim O'Brien has aliens in any of his stories. Or love scenes with aliens.

So, I can talk about writing sci-fi. I can talk about getting rejected and perservering. I can talk about setting up good writing habits.

Some of my anxiety, I think, goes back to what I remember of other student writers when I was in college. Most of them wrote what I would consider literary fiction. I never felt any pressure from a professor to write anything "literary," but I definitely put pressure on myself to try to match what other students were doing. Genre fiction or commercial fiction, for whatever reason, is often perceived as "lesser." But here's the thing, in the intervening years I've learned...that's just dumb. Writing is writing. You sit down to tell a good story and whether it involves ghosts or a depressed housewife in New Orleans who walks into the ocean and drowns doesn't matter. It's just about telling your story, the one that entertains you.

Huh. I think I feel better. : )