Last week, I had the privilege to attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, which is world renowned, as my classmate pointed out to me. In our class of eleven, about half were from Iowa, while the others were from other states including Texas, California, Arizona and Florida, and one man came from Japan! What a group! The festival has week long sessions, and weekend sessions. Each week, about one hundred people attend, that is my guess for a number, and they are divided into classes of up to twelve.

The class I chose was called “Take Five.” It was a class for writing fiction, and each day we focused on one element of the art of storytelling. What were those focal points? Character, setting, dialogue, conflict (also known as plot). We read published stories and discussed them, then we wrote in class, and then we had assignments to take home. It was intense and deeply rewarding. Our take home assignments were to be one page, double spaced, so that is to say, not many words at all. In my classes in China, students used to ask earnestly, “How many words?” and my answer was “Enough to do the job,” which did not satisfy them at all, since they are oriented to test taking. One page, double spaced, size 12 font, is roughly 300 words. I found that I could do these in about an hour.

The exercise in writing dialogue gave us the constraint of using only seven words for each speech a character makes. Many of my classmates wrote descriptions for setting, and then a few lines of dialogue. I wrote the whole page of dialogue alone. We had to start with the sentence, “‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said.” This set of six words gives us two characters, the speaker and another person, and a conflict. I learned that using so few words makes us aware of the weight of each word. We could say we must “freight” our words to carry layers of meaning. Try it yourself, to see what you can do.

For the final day, Friday, we had to write a story, limited to 500 words. This used to be called “short short story” but now is known as “micro-fiction.” It was quite a challenge. We were all tired from the heat, and the intensity of the class. We each read our story, then the class members made comments. Our rule was not to critique in the usual sense, but to give positive comments to encourage each writer. So, we all came home with positive reinforcement.

Besides the classes, there were other activities, among them lectures in the morning, called “The Eleventh Hour.” Usually the phrase “eleventh hour” means “the last possible moment” but in this case it meant literally 11:00 am. I attended only one of these, the one of most interest to me. It was on managing time, always a challenge for me. The speaker told us that “They say,” if you tie a monkey to a tree, he will spend his energy trying to escape. If, however, you put him next to the tree, he will find it of interest and climb the tree. Thus must we think of the time for our writing. Commit to a time for writing, go to your study, and start writing, if you want to. If you really don’t want to, don’t, but stay in the study for the designated time. I was reminded of my policy in child care for nap time. “I’m not tired,” the children whined. I said, “You don’t have to sleep, but you have to be still and quiet for half an hour.” Very few times, very few children did not fall asleep in that half hour. It will be the same for writing, we learned. “Don’t tie the monkey to the tree,” the speaker said.

I am quite excited about all that I learned, all that I did, and all the people I met — writers in various stages, from all over the world. I went looking for focus and direction, and I think I have that now. I hope that you have your direction now, but if you don’t, try some kind of conference of interest to you. You’ll be surprised.