This is the last week of my fall classes and that always makes me a little gloomy because I don’t like for things to end and I thought these classes went especially well. But I did start to think about what characterizes a good class, and I came up with this list.

1. People show up.  This seems basic, but it doesn’t always happen. There is nothing more discouraging than expecting to see fourteen smiling faces and instead seeing three puzzled ones. My worst experience was a few years ago when only one guy showed up. He was very pleasant, and I didn’t want to cancel the class as he had gone to the effort of attending, so we went out for drinks. This is not something Gotham encourages, however.

2. People submit writing. This also seems basic, but it is often the case, especially in a Fiction One class, that people are too nervous to submit anything and so I wind up handing out copies of “The Dead” for our discussion, which is all well and good except that James Joyce does not really need my writing advice. I had one class in which no one submitted any work until the sixth week, and by the time we got there I was so desperate, that the class began to take on the characteristics of group therapy.  “You seem to be feeling very insecure,” I would start off the class by saying, and it went downhill from there.

3. Students are willing to revise. I always get a sinking feeling when someone hands out a story to be critiqued and says, “This is a final draft.” The fact is, you could hand out copies of “The Dead,” and a workshop would find ways to improve it. There is always something to say and it’s not always right, but a lot of the times it is. Several of my students this term have done a masterful job of revising, and have brought their stories up to a publishable level, which brings me to the next point…

4. The students are serious about their craft. Yes, this is adult education and no one gets grades and no one, probably, is going to get thrown out of class. And yet, especially in the classes I taught this semester, I was struck by how seriously the students approached their writing. This is not a hobby. This is something heartfelt and beautiful.

5. The students like each other. It is very hard to teach a class in which students feel contempt for each other, or just don’t care about each other. One of my more discouraging moments came in the tenth week of a class (some years ago) when a woman read an absolutely harrowing story about some type of abuse and the man sitting next to her, who had been sitting next to her for ten weeks, said, “And what’s your name?”  The best case scenario is that the students will form friendships that will continue after class is over, and writing groups. Or that they will reenroll.

6. The students like me. Well, I won’t go into that at length, except to say I have faced down my share of steely looks in the past, and it is much nicer to see a smile.

7. The students are ordering The Fiction Class. This is off topic, but I thought I’d throw it in because, as my publicist is fond of saying (and this is probably worth another blog) every mention counts.

So what about you? Have you taken a class at Gotham, or elsewhere? What would you add to this list?

Every November I have to have a bone scan, which, as you can imagine, is not the high point of my year. If you’ve ever had it done, you’ll know that it requires lying still on a slab while a machine inches its way, slowly, slowly, from your head down to your toes. And back. Best of all, because it starts off at your head, it means that for four minutes you have this whirring, malevolent thing hovering right over your face. As the technician says, in her mournful Russian accent, “Best to close your eyes.”

Of course, closing your eyes with an instrument that portends death over your face isn’t necessarily conducive to calm. Every year I promise myself that I will memorize some wonderful poem before I go through this, generally something by Auden, but the minute that machine starts to creep, my mind empties and I revert to the Lord’s Prayer. Though this year, somewhat to my horror, my mind emptied and then switched to the image of Sabrina in Dancing with the Stars. Wasn’t it Woody Allen who had a routine about being hanged and he said the life that passed before his eyes wasn’t his own?

Anyway, the point here is actually the technician and not me. I have become very fond of this woman over the years because she is kind and she always winks at me to let me know I’m all right, even though she should have the doctor tell me. She happens to have a daughter the same age as my son and we went through the application to college experience together.

She’s always walked with a cane, but this year she mentioned that she had M.S. and it was getting worse. She’s having trouble walking; she’s tired, and she’s not sure how much longer she’s going to be able to work. Then she told me that recently she went up to

Boston to visit her daughter, who is in college there. She knew she’d have trouble walking around the city and doing things with her daughter, and she wanted to have fun, and so she decided to use a wheelchair, for the first time. This was a scary decision because she had to accept the fact that she was becoming an invalid, but she decided to make the best of her decision. She wore nice clothes, she put on a lot of make up and she wound up having a great time. “I looked good,” she said. “Not at all middle aged.”I was so inspired by her story—by her courage and the way she embraced joy in her life. This is what I would love to be like myself and this is what I want my writing to convey. I’m not exactly sure how to do it, but I have to believe that if you fill your mind with joyful and courageous thoughts that some of that will translate onto the page.

Of course, I left the hospital feeling cheerful and inspired and decided, as a treat, that I would go to the bakery and get myself a muffin. And I was sitting in the bakery parking lot, eating said muffin, when I became conscious of the fact that there were four helicopters overhead and police cars racing by. I asked someone what was happening and he said, “Oh, there’s a sniper on the Saw Mill.” And so does life conspire to undermine my best intentions. I still went home and wrote, but I locked the doors.

So how about you? Who inspires you?