I’m desperately working on the presentation for the characterization class I’m giving this Saturday, entitled “Create Characters: Heroes Who Stand Tall & Villains Who Cast Shadows” It’s an all-day class, 9am-3pm, so I have lots of time that needs to be filled.

The good news is that I LOVE the class description I was given, so I have plenty of good stuff to work with, actually probably too much to work with. I suspect like all my other presentations, by the time I say what I want to say, I’ll have to trim things by about 30%.

I’d hoped to have the presentation done last weekend so I could send the handouts off to be copied by the college, but, alas, it didn’t happen. The good news related to that, is that I was given a new-to-me laser printer, so I can print off handouts for basically the cost of paper. So, I suspect I’ll be printing off handouts at terrible hours Friday night.

As always, I’m learning tons as I design the class. Having to present a topic forces me to define a lot of things that have been bouncing around in my head, and crystallizes concepts into words that others can understand. I love doing it. I love the discovery of everything I’m learning. I love the condensation of several years of work into a really cool graphic that says it clearly defines the point I’m trying to make. Yes, I’ve been working at this learning-to-write s**t for 6.5 years and don’t have a thing published, on the other hand, I can create classes that I’d have loved if somebody could have taught me… it helps make all the pain-and-agony worth it.

And I love standing up in front of the class and sharing it. Not because I’m better than them or anything like that, but because the actual act of attempting to teach it crystallizes it even further. The questions they ask cause me to define it even more. I did a class for Windy City a while back that I’d condensed down from a class I did for DucKon, and one of the Windy City authors asked me a question that it took me about a day to answer, and about an hour to fix the graphic, but her question made my presentation of the concept so much more clear, and increased my understanding of it 10-fold.

So, why am I going through the agony of weeks and weeks of prep time to put this presentation together for a class I will teach three times and get paid barely a pittance for?

Because I learn so damn much in the process.