I am not at all sure about this creative writing class I’ve gotten myself into. I’m trying to tell myself it can’t hurt and it might help with the winter blahs and writers’ block… but I dunno.
Problem #1 is that it’s very focused on “literary” fiction. I always knew this would be a problem with any class, because most of them are total snobs about the type of writing I find most interesting, which is science fiction. Badly written sci-fi is everywhere, and I won’t defend it. But a story that has science fiction or fantasy elements that is well written is sublime. I would take Kurt Vonnegut over Hemmingway or whatever other literary writer you care to name any day.
So, the class involves a lot of reading of these “literary” types of short story. ICK! UGH! GAG! What could be worse than being forced to read emotionally manipulative claptrap about white people from a bygone era.
Which brings us to problem #2 which is that our Mary Poppins of a professor doesn’t like negativity and tearing things down. We are supposed to be learning from masters, here, not criticising them. So not only do I have to read and comment on and write essays about a bunch of lame bullshit, I don’t even get the release of finding things to put down and demean in any of it. KILL ME!
And of course problem #3 is that when it comes time for me to actually write fictional stuff myself I have to either work twice as hard to make sure my sci-fi is literary enough or else I’m stuck writing lame crap which meets with teachers approval.
This is exactly why I always resisted just signing up for some random class without making sure it matched my needs. But I wasn’t doing anything productive so I talked myself into doing this on the theory that it couldn’t hurt, could it? Well, lovely. Now I’m stuck with this lame ass bullshit.
Should I drop out? I probably can pull out now and save my parents a few hundred dollars. I better decide quick though because that window won’t stay open long, a week or two at most and week one is almost over already, I’m guessing.
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If it isn’t going to help you do the kind of writing you want to do, I would say drop out of it before it’s too late to get your money back. Personally, most of the reading I’ve done is science fiction, and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it, just as much as I enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s plays in the original English, and just as much as I enjoyed reading the classics like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens (which none of my classmates liked). I’ve read a lot of literature that was probably not as good as it could have been, but if the characters were ones to whom I could relate, it was good in my eyes.
Comment by vesta44 January 29, 2009 @ 11:20 pm