Working with an aspiring writer

Using the online tutoring platform Wyzant, I just met with a student who wants to become a better writer and who is working on a "fantasy" novel. Really, what he wants to write is a tragedy; the "medieval" trappings are simply a device--and honestly, I'm not quite sure why he wanted them, but whatever. He does, so we'll work from there. I talked to him a tiny bit about fantasy as a genre, what it is and what it does, but mostly I talked more concretely about things like having the personas of the main characters more vividly present in the first chapter, having the emotional stakes higher (and more clear), and making sure he knows enough about the characters to know how and why the main plot points could happen. I found out toward the end of the lesson that he feels like, once he puts something on paper, it's therefore and forever after immutable, so my first assignment for him was to write five pages of anything, then make a copy of the file and make deep, systemic changes to what he's written. This is a bit of "do as I say, not as I do," but he really needs to know that revising is not only possible but necessary. I also wanted him to do a detailed character sketch of one character, one he doesn't know very well yet but who will ultimately be an important part of the overall plot.

It was interesting--and it's going to work in a very catch-as-catch-can way going forward; he's not sure when he'll have time to write, and I'm not sure how this is going to work generally speaking. But we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, the students in my online class are turning into idiots, all of them, asking questions about things I just explained--one student asking a question in reply to the email that answered precisely that question. I'm getting a bit testy with them. They're also emailing assignments to me when I've specifically told them not to--but they're doing that because they're experiencing glitches with Blackboard. They probably need to clear their computer cache and cookies, but if I tell them that, their brains will explode. I was hoping to get an email from the help desk about how to do that, so I could mail instructions to my students, but I haven't gotten that yet. The Blackboard glitches are annoying to me and anxiety-producing for the students. Not happy about any of that either.

In fact, I'm sort of systemically grumpy. But I think I was helpful/encouraging to the aspiring novelist. I reckon I'll find out in a while whether he liked what I did well enough to want to use me again.

I'm too tired for more tonight. But it is fun working with the potential novelist. I wish we could work together more often and at greater length. Much more fun than teaching comp.