Page fright

It's barely Week Three and I've already hit a wall in my writing class.

The assignment for Thursday is to "develop and outline a strategy for approaching and preparing a non-fiction project." Basically, we have to decide what story we want to write, and start thinking about what kind of research, interviews, and work it will take to get us there. We don't have to commit to the topic, which is nice, but, for once, commitment is not my problem.

As I mentioned before, many of my classmates have a story to tell. There is the girl whose husband was murdered, the woman with a relative from the Spanish resistance, the entertainment accountant who is planning a salacious industry exposé. Then there are the people who want to unearth touching stories of interesting family members - a hilarious grandfather, one woman's troubled relationship with her mother, a girl's family business running a kosher deli. Not all things I would necessarily want to read, but each idea has some serious legs.

What I've always imagined myself writing is a collection of essays, mostly about the guys I've dated but also my family and friends with a hefty dose of pop culture thrown in. I have 20+ years of journals to pull from, references and quotes and memories at my disposal, practically begging to be reframed into something greater. I've schlepped these things around the country - they should probably do more than gather dust under my bed.

But I just feel like the idea is so, I don't know, done? Exhausted? Cliche? That the people who have pioneered and made popular this genre, have no doubt done it better than me. And that compared to the more serious stories being developed in my classroom, this idea is such a trivial pursuit.

It doesn't help that, by all accounts, I am a very boring person. I avoid drama like I avoid bad cliches, such as the one that would have fit perfectly in this sentence, "like the plague." All of my relationships have been remarkably unremarkable - they've just shaped my life which, as a narcissist, I am compelled to share with the world.

So my challenge, then, is to make the uninteresting, inspiring. To pull some universal truth of out these personal memories, and avoid the Carrie Bradshaw cliche. While I don't wish for anything so dramatic in my life to happen only for the sake of a story, I am starting to rethink my commitment to "non-fiction."