After the whirlwind Wisconsin trip this weekend, I enjoyed going to the third class of Gish’s Short Story writing workshop. The more time I spend around him in that class, the more I realize how little I know about so many aspects of writing, and particularly in its technical dimensions.

Gish is great at asking us during class time about a given story’s mode, or style, or narrative type, or one of six or seven other technical categories that he believes we should be able to describe related to any story we read. Understanding the story’s construction is being able to build it effectively as well, he tells us.

Mostly, I just know he knows about writing. As a student. As a teacher. As an author. And as a mentor.

Tonight he told a great story that kind of hit me as what I needed to hear for the night.

One time, he was at a convention promoting a book he had just completed and that UNLV Press published for him. It so happened that he ended up sitting at a table next door to best-selling major-press crime novelist Michael Connelly who was also promoting a book. Gish and Connelly were friends through their shared vocation, and in a short time after the doors opened for the day’s visitors, Gish would meet a straggler or two, while the line to Connelly’s table extend far down the aisle they were on, and then wrapped around a corner. Seeing Connelly’s strand of fans, Robert leaned over and said to Connelly something like “Wow- I guess I should pack it in and leave this to the pros.”

Connelly corrected him.

“Writing is fighting, so you to keep on fighting.” And this line he signed into a copy of his book that he gave to Gish.

That is pretty much it. Writing is fighting. To say something at all is to take your thoughts and put them out there, in front of people, where they can be affirmed, challenged, belittled, ignored, attacked, or championed.

Writing is fighting.

In the second hour of the class tonight, a few students had brought story drafts in that we could read and review. We got to two of them. We read the last two pages of the one by Steven Ingraham, a lawyer by day I’ve attended these periodic writing classes with in each of the last three semesters. Any time we end up reading anything by him in a class, I tend to put down his writings in awe. He’s like the Michael Connelly of these small classes I am in. Ingraham is remarkably gifted as a story teller and intelligent wordsmith. I am Gish sitting near him in class, thinking I should maybe leave writing to the pros.

Writing is fighting, so you keep on fighting to learn how to effectively say what you need to, and got to.