(no subject)

[ricevermicelli]

I'm taking this writing class.

This mostly means that on Tuesday nights, I swear and grumble about other people's fiction.

I feel really bad about this. I don't want to be gratuitously mean, and I understand that these people signed up for approximately the same reasons that I did. I think. I'm actually not sure about that. I signed up because I thought a deadline and a chance of feedback would actually get me to write.

If there's one thing about the people in this class that has stood out so far it is this: they are geeks. Not the good kind of proud and happy geeks that I know and love, but the squishy, unreconstituted kind. I'm getting the feeling that they mostly don't spend much time with people, which is a shame, because a few conversations would improve their knowledge about the world immensely. Also, it's hard for me to say nice things to people whose writing is so badly spelled and so full of practical errors which miniscule amounts of research or just getting out of the house now and then would correct.

This week's most awful example features a murder which occurs in the staff lounge at the Bellagio. The murderer is not himself on staff, and how he gets in to the lounge is not addressed. After whacking the stupidest waitress on the strip (who, when confronted in the otherwise improbably empty staff lounge with a man she knows to be both drunk and obsessive doesn't leave or call security or do any of the reasonable things one might do), the murderer walks out the back door, and goes back in the front to play cards.

I can think of about a dozen ways this is just impossible, and a single, easy way to check them out. However, I feel like telling her that would be unfair. I'd be taking advantage of superior access to information. It's not her fault she doesn't know the people I know, but it probably is her fault that she doesn't appear to talk to anyone.

And she could probably watch the previews for Ocean's Eleven any time.

Comments

[bagoffarts.livejournal.com]

That was my feeling about the creative writing class I took at a community college. So much incompetence out there. ugh. The worst is when they critique your work and all they say is "I liked it." Especially bad when you know you knocked it out an hour before class because you needed _something_, and it was all you could scrounge together.

Hopefully it will get better.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

The rule I generally use is that the author gets a pass on wildly improbable so long as the reason for doing it made some interesting sense. So I have no problem with Xena knowing both Julius Caesar and Goliath, because the stories end up being pretty good. (Though come to think of it, how bad a can a story with Lucy Lawless in that outfit actually be?)

I'd give the nerds in your class an additional pass in that they do have to write something every week, and may well not have time to do research, but can only manage to flesh out the first "what if?" that comes into their poor little heads.

Besides, bad grammar and no plot are enough of a reason to take those yahoos to task - hanging one's willing suspension of disbelief by the neck until dead, dead, dead is just a bonus, really.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

This is all very well except that they don't have to write something every week. They have to turn in a story twice over the course of ten weeks. And her research gaps really are things she could fix by watching the previews for Ocean's Eleven, or that Angel ep where they go to Vegas.

Which doesn't really excuse the testiness.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Which doesn't really excuse the testiness.

Hey, better with them than with me.

One of my best discussions about how Lear went came with Fernando's wife Kim. She had a long list of things she was very critical of, which were all spot on, to my mind. (Of course, she did soften things at the end by saying the play was actually good enough to be worth tearing apart.) I found the commentary far more useful than kind nothings would have been.

Marian has a very nice house mate, Beth. It is absolutely useless to try out a recipe on her, because no matter what sort of disaster you present, it will be "good". When I've done something I'm presenting to the public, I much prefer a practiced critical eye to an unthinking polite one.

Even if it's testy.

[sunspiral.livejournal.com]

There are various local folks involved in writer's groups, which might give you the environment that you're looking for, and definitely operate at a higher skill level. roozle might be able to point you towards info on some.

[zellandyne.livejournal.com]

I was in a graduate level writing program at USC, and I had the same problem, which says alot. There were things like the description, "the brunette abode," and the comment in class, "conveyance - what's a conveyance? Who really uses words like that?" and the day that 80 percent of the class thought that Helen of Troy was a biblical reference... I'm so glad I'm done.

I restrained my annoyance and tried to give useful feedback. Which depended a lot on what kind of feedback people were open to. The better writers, I noticed, tended to be a lot more open. Some of them were there for the same reason I was - to write more regularly, get critique, and eventually publish. Some of them were there as personal vanity projects. There wasn't much to do with them. What was interesting for me, though, my last semester, was another student coming up to me and asking me why I was there, since she thought my writing was so much better than everyone else's. I found that both depressing and validating.

Of course, now I've taught creative writing. But at least, at Scripps, the majority of people there have a clue.

Oh, and for deadlines, I have a couple of methods. One, asking someone to read a story for me and then forcing myself to get it to them by the date I set. Another is finding something I really, really want, and telling myself if I sell a story I get to buy it with the proceeds. The other is finding a good writer's workshop or writer's group. Thus far the best ongoing one I've found was actually a playwriting group. The best overall was Clarion West (a six week intensive sci-fi workshop). If you can take time away from your daily life, a workshop like that, or one of the shorter one weekers/weekenders could be good.

Anyway, you have my sympathy. And good luck.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Thanks - things have actually gotten significantly better in the last few weeks (which is mostly to say that the really hopeless cases dropped out).