House and Writing Progress

Things continue to progress on the home purchase. Yesterday I faxed a small stack of paperwork to Amber at Wells Fargo, took a call from our lawyers office requesting some title search documentation, and had Amber fax that to them. Nothing like playing go-between. I also sat with my insurance agent and found out what information I needed to get about the house (which I got last night and mailed to him this morning). The excitement never ends *yawn*.

On a more personal front, I finally sat down and wrote something to satisfy the next exercise in the fiction-writing book Clint loaned me. I've had mixed results with the exercises but their main purpose (in my mind) is just to get me used to expressing my creativity in a more focused way. This last one was a joy to write, even though I had been dreading it for a couple weeks (I know, you're supposed to do one a day, at least).

The exercise said to take a fight you had been in, whether verbal or physical, and turn it into a scene. The idea here is to explore writing about conflict, but also to help train you to take real life experiences and fictionalize them (i.e. lie about how they happened in order to make them more interesting :) ). My problem here is that I am not a fighter. I have never been in a real physical fight (been beat up plenty of times, ran away from plenty of fights, but that's not the same), and I try to avoid verbal fights as well. I am always trying to calm verbal fights down, get people to detach emotionally and discuss the reasons behind the conflict (perhaps to a fault). That's what I do. It's what I've always done.

But then something Jess said reminded me of something -- I used to have this real problem with arguing online. I was right, damnit, and loved to try and prove it. Looking back now I realize that I was wrong a lot of times, and even when I was right I was a real prick about it. But that's not the point. The point was I could fictionalize an online "fight" and make it a funny scene where I poke fun at my own history of being an online idealist with no real knowledge to back up his furiously defended opinions.

And so I did. It was a ton of fun to write, and looking back at it afterwards it definitely satisfied the conditions of the exercise, even if it's not quite what they had in mind.

Time to move on. I gotta try not to read the next exercise before I do it, because it makes me dread doing them. I should go in blind. But I saw the first sentence of the next exercise, and it has to do with recreating a scene in your memory which was important at the time but which you don't remember well, or something similar. Ought to be challenging, but I guess that's part of the point.