Writing in College, or Sisyphus Gets a BA - Part 1

My buddy Dominick is in the habit of introducing me with the statement: "This is [nickname I picked up years ago under murky circumstances]. He's a writer."

In the interest of managing expectations, I usually back off of this plateau and say something akin to, "Well, I'm studying writing at UW-Milwaukee." If I'm lucky, they just ask me what kind of writing I do, and I can quickly end the conversation by simply confusing them ("Tragicomic absurdist realism. It's hard to explain.").

Other times, our intrepid newcomer feels a need to press on, and they ask me: "What do you think of the writing program up there?" Occasionally, the same sentiment is expressed far more snidely: "Oh yeah? Where did Hemingway go to college for writing?" Either way, it's the same question. To wit - does taking college writing classes do anything to actually improve your writing?

There's a question I've been asking myself, with progressively more pessimistic answers, for the past three years. At the moment, I'm thinking that the teachers are occasionally helpful, though whether they're worth three grand a semester is pretty much up in the air. Your fellow students, though, are generally only helpful indirectly, and usually in a way that's bound to piss you off.

The workshop system works like this: first, you write something. Then you bring your stuff to the class. They edit the work and give you comments, and you do the same for their manuscripts. On the basis of their commentary, you then edit the work and turn it in to the instructor for a grade. The first and biggest problem with this system is that, at UW-Milwaukee (and a lot of other places), there isn't really any clear method of separating people with raw talent that needs to be polished from people who suck, and will probably suck forever. It is a time-honored tradition that, in each writing workshop, there are always a couple of writers who Just Plain Suck.

Now, most writers are insecure about their work when they get started (and probably forever after, but I'm not a mind reader). The problem is that they tend to react to this with a lot of pompous bravado - you just don't get it, man. You can try and give them tips on their writing, but if you don't preface it with a lot of kowtowing about how it's already almost perfect and you're just splitting hairs, they're just going to snarl at you. Most young writers don't want to be told how to get better - they want to be told that they're already brilliant, and that no further work will be required to etch their name upon the age.

For example, I had this guy in my last workshop, who we'll call "Robbie." Robbie was this wanky, right-on film major who, for some reason, had wandered into the writing department. He wrote this clunky, overwrought story about a father taking his kids to Chuck E. Cheese, and loaded it down with plenty of phoned-in angst and short, Palahniuk-ish generalizations about the futility of modern life. Robbie, of course, thought his work would knock our socks off.

Then it went into the workshop meatgrinder. I don't think we ever actually got to the content of his story (such as it was), because we ended up spending most of the hour trying to decrypt his baffling mechanics. Robbie apparently didn't believe in commas, and he would indent almost at random, including, on one occasion, right in the middle of a sentence. Obviously, this was a first draft. But going into a writing program without an understanding of basic mechanics is kind of like saying that you want to attend an art program, but cannot draw.

(Actually, a friend of mine who works as a sculptor tells me this is shockingly common, but let's not digress.)

Around the fortieth or fiftieth comment pointing out an extremely basic error, Robbie snapped.

"Okay," he huffed. "Everything in that story is there for a reason. I wrote it how it's written for a reason."

Our instructor, Professor George Makana Clark (a helluva guy, and one of few writing instructors I've ever had much respect for), let a wicked grin slide across his face. "Robbie," he said, "after your last submission, I told you to go get help at the Writing Center. Did you... go to the Writing Center, Robbie?"

"Yep," Robbie said. Professor Clark smiled a bit larger.

"And they told you you could indent like this?"

"Yeah," Robbie said. "They said as long as I was consistent..."

"But you're not consistent, are you, Robbie? In fact, there are two pages here where you don't indent anything." Pause. "Are you sure the person you spoke with actually worked in the writing center? It wasn't, say, a homeless person?"

And that's why I liked Doctor Clark. Beyond having proved himself in the trenches (he won an O. Henry Prize in 2006) and dispensing some good sense, if your writing sucked, the man wouldn't pull any punches - he would tell you that you sucked. But more about that in my next installment.

"Now, John," you say. "It couldn't all have been bad. As y0u said yourself, there were indirect benefits from dealing with these proles."

Indeed there were. These shitwits, for all their flaws, probably kept me writing and submitting. It's easy to lose track of the odds in the writing game. Nothing's more intimidating than those little blurbs under each magazine in the Writer's Marketplace, which usually go something like this: "Receives 400,000 submissions a month. Accepts 2 per quarter."

"Jesus," you think, "They reject an ungodly percentage of their submissions! How will I ever get into that other 1%?"

And then you realize - those hordes of rejected writers aren't generally made up of people like you, slaving away over a piece for weeks on end, editting, drafting and re-drafting until you think red ink is going to start pouring out of your nose.

Nope. Those hordes of losers are self-important dipsticks like Robbie, poor souls who truly believe that every nugget that drops out of their brain is Pure Genius, and that any failure to realize this is a perception issue on your part.

Wanna stand out from the crowd in writing? It's very simple - get over yourself.