I have to say, I’m probably enjoying my online courses more than I have a right to. When I was a teenager I hated school. I took off every chance I got – would drive to Niagara Falls for a day instead of going to classes. But now that I’m an adult I don’t understand my mindset back then. Okay, sure, to me high school seemed pretty useless. After all, what better way to learn about life than live it? The walls of an institution didn’t seem the most conducive setting for LIFE with capital letters. I suppose, now that I’m writing about the life of a teenager in my novel, it’s good to look back and remember as much of that time as I can.

But I digress.

This post is supposed to be about my current schooling. I passed my grammar course with a fairly decent 83% and now I’m on the last phase to getting my certificate – Writing Short Stories.

Before the course started I thought I was just going to sail through it, much as I thought I would with the grammar course. Why wouldn’t I? After all, I can bang out a respectable short story in an afternoon. When I received the lesson plan however, I was stopped in my tracks. You see, the course will take me almost up to Christmas and I will have one short story to write. First I must submit an idea. A few weeks later, my task is to hand in a first draft, and at the beginning of December I must write the final draft.

So I’ve got all this time to write a short story. No problem, you would think. But I’ve got all this time to write a short story, and that’s the problem! To come up with ONE idea and ruminate over it over the course of two months is torture to me. You see, I’m what is commonly referred to these days as a ‘pantser.’ I get an idea, but I not only have to write it down right away, if I don’t actually write the story right away, I’ll lose it.

You might say, so just write the story and have done with it. Hand it in when it’s time. That would be fine, except my OCD won’t allow it. If I know myself well, I will write it, review it, edit it, edit it some more, and given that much time and that much editing, it’s going to look like a pile of steaming crap by the time I go to submit it, because I’ll have overthunk it to death.

I have decided, then, to try for once to actually take my time. Do the whole outline thing, maybe even draw myself a storyboard; create characters before I write the thing… I’ll treat it like an experiment. Do it the way the other half – the non-panster – does it. It’s going to be a challenge.