Still Breathing

Contrary to popular belief, I am not, in fact, dead. Between two different and distinct computer meltdowns, a job that requires me to get up at five in the morning, and some pretty hair economic difficulties, posting time has been a little hard to come by. I am delighted to report, however, that the novel is slated to be done in the next ten days - and that's DONE done, mind you. As in, start sending the fucker out. I'd say I'm overjoyed, but really, the best word is probably "relieved."

In the meantime, I suspect I'm beginning to get something of a reputation. There is, of course, my long-standing and well-known distaste for college writing workshops. I've also turned down friendly invitations from two different independent writers groups of late. The growing - and to my mind, shocking - consensus seems to be that I just don't take criticism real well.

So, to clarify - I LOVE criticism. It gets me closer to my goal of publishing something good. But I do myself and my writing the service of considering the SOURCE of that criticism.

Common sense notwithstanding, it seems that many of my colleagues out here in the pre-published wilderness continue to cling to the writer's group as an unambigously Good Thing. My question is fairly simple: If these people have such excellent knowledge to share, such profound insight into the craft of writing... why aren't they published?

Now, far be it from me to pump my own vita - I've got three publications to my name, all in small literary magazines (one of which has since folded), so I'm by no means a shoe-in for the Pulitzer. With that said, I don't really see the point in getting tips on how to create good - i.e. publishable - prose from a bunch of people who aren't published, and very possibly aren't even trying that hard. Like it or not, folks, a writer IS his credits.

Let's look, for example, at my 415 fiction workshop at UWM. In the group, we had:

- One wanky, talentless film major who I've already mentioned
- One guy who had glimmers of real talent, but couldn't stop aping Chuck Palahniuk
- One girl who wrote what amounted to lesbian slash fiction, and whose dialogue contained no contractions whatsoever (think about it)
- Three different girls who had decided by mid-semester to change their majors away from creative writing
- One stoner who spent the semester trying to adapt the Family Guy school of random jokes to the short story medium (I know, tempting, but it didn't take)

The professor himself was a wonderful source of advice, but other than that, the thing was almost a wash.

And furthermore, you can't even always count on the teachers to be competent. I had exactly one instructor in the creative writing program who I felt helped me in any way. Some of them are just tenured d-bags, skating on past accomplishments and cultivating a personality cult. I had one instructor who actually marked me down points for having a drunken character say "god damn," chiding me that such wanton profanity would severely limit my target audience. This professor also became infamous for a lecture on Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," in which she claimed "Veldt" was the German word for "world," and so Bradbury has been using the title to imply the techno-nightmare in the story was really "our world." I had the audacity to raise my hand and point out that the German word for "world" is in fact "Welt," and that "Veldt" is a Dutch-Afrikaaner term for grassland. Several students in the class actually glared at me for that.

Writer's groups are basically a placebo, something to make you "feel like a writer" without actually requiring anything terribly difficult of you. Never forget - the central theme of most young writer's lives is self-deception. Everybody wants to believe they're bound for the bigtime, but nobody wants to deal with the possibility that they're not good enough. You should be comparing yourself to the Big Boys on the shelf at Barnes & Noble; comparing yourself to the other people in a workshop will, at best, help you become a very talented dilettante.