My Season of Classes

By Kris Neri

I’m entering my season of classes. Not that it’s a real time on the calendar. It’s just that I’ve been too busy with my own recent releases, High Crimes on the Magical Plane and Revenge for Old Times’ Sake, to accept teaching assignments. But I’ve missed teaching, missed the interaction with students, even if all my classes now are online. So, I’ve scheduled three classes between now and the end of the year. My season of classes.

I’m already engaged in one class. I’m currently teaching a 5-week characterization workshop for the Guppy Chapter of Sisters in Crime, called “Creating Characters That Live Off the Page.” The Guppies are an exciting, determined group, and I absolutely love creating classes and working with them. 

In August, I’ll be offering a 1-week online marketing class, “Approaching the Mystery Marketplace,” through the Writers’ Program of the UCLA Extension School, which will be a fun, fast-paced, fact-packed week on getting published.

Then, in September, I'll be repeating my popular online mystery writing course, “Committing the Perfect Crime: Writing Your First Mystery,” for the UCLA Extension School's Writers' Program.

Online courses are tough to create. All good instructors plan their courses, naturally, but in classroom  situations, they don't need to write every word of every lecture. Nor proofread them until they're perfect. But that's how online courses work. Proofing online material is like proofing a novel — I swear, mistakes creep in while you sleep.

On the upside, once an online course is finalized, the theory goes, the teacher doesn't have to revisit that work again. She can simply offer up those lectures to new students without having to put in any extra work. For the lecture part of the course, anyway; assignment feedback and questions from students work pretty much like classroom situations, except that they're typed.

But I like to review my courses before I offer them again, as I recently did for my September class. I look at the lectures to see if I can better clarify areas that have plagued some students. I add new assignments, take others out, and come up with new ways this round of students can attack certain challenges.

 As I reviewed my course, it struck me anew how much this class requires students to cover, and how much new mystery writers need to learn. And these are just the basics — they'll have to deepen their knowledge of all of this material as they go on. It also struck me what an act of faith and hope it is whenever anyone sets out to learn a new discipline.

While everyone who is published today made it over that hump — most take the abilities they developed for granted now, and have largely forgotten the growing pains they must have suffered along the way. I've never had kids, but I've heard women forget the pain of childbirth the same way.

While I've always been told I'm a compassionate instructor, nothing has brought back the difficulty of the journey, and the emotional ups-and-downs, like the art classes I've taken off and on for years. They're closer in time, and in memory, for me than learning to write. Granted, they're not precisely the same. The process of learning art contains a physical component. It's hard to get pencils and fingers and brushes move in a way that will allow what appears on the paper or canvas to approximate that image in the artist's mind. But while a writing student's fingers merely have to hit the right keys on the keyboard, the student's inability to paint as effective a word picture as she longs to, can feel just as frustrating.

Those times when I took art classes, while simultaneously teaching writing classes, allowed me to see  the struggle from both sides. I remember nights of dragging myself to art class, and confessing to my teacher that I felt hopelessly inept, forcing him to be as much a therapist as an instructor — even as I gave the same pep talks to writing students who were pained by their slow progress. I also remember the smug smile my art teacher would flash at times, I suspect because he could see the progress I was making when I could not — while I enjoyed that same satisfaction with my writing students. Every teacher observes when students are making leaps before the students make those discoveries themselves.

So…I try to remember my own leaps of faith, when I’m helping others take theirs. Although my September course is billed as "Writing Your First Mystery," it actually attracts a range of students, some newbies, some intermediates, and even a few who've been published, though those usually come to the mystery from other genres. I welcome them all, of course, and help them to the best of my ability. But I bring my strongest wishes for the newer ones. So that they can make the progress I know they're capable of, even if they don't know it. So that their leaps of faith and hope will pay off.

Comments

[Elaine Viets]

Kris, I've taught courses in class rooms, but never online. I like the contact with the students, and playing off their questions.

[krisneri]

There's nothing like face-to-face teaching. But I've come to see value in online teaching, beyond the fact that I can teach for a California school without having to live there. Newer students are less reluctant to present their writings, probably because they can't see any faces. And they tell me they work more because it's like having a daily class, rather than a weekly one. But I do miss seeing those faces.

[Mary Saums]

Kris, I wanted to sign up for the Guppies class but things are just too hectic around here right now. Everyone talks about how great your previous courses were. I can never get enough classes on plotting, so I hope you'll be doing one of those next year.

[Kristina L]

I've taught a class (related to work) through WebEx. It't tough when you can't watch their faces to see if/when people are getting confused, and I need to go over a subject in a different way.

[krisneri]

Mary, these classes are more geared to newbies and intermediates than accomplished published authors, like you. But my September UCLA class is heavy on plotting, and I'd be glad to repeat the plotting class I created for the Guppies if they ever want it. I really enjoy working with them.

[krisneri]

Kristina, I do know what you mean. I miss not seeing the confusion and the start of a question that forms on some student's faces, especially since some people convince themselves they shouldn't ask the question because they'll look foolish or some such thing, and the teacher has to draw them out. There are advantages to online instruction, but that's a distinct disadvantage.