12/10/2004

The Beginning of the End

Seeing as how I haven't made a single entry here about my return to Oz, I figure why not just start at the end. It's much more interesting than the beginning, and I have more to say than just, 'Australia is great, wish you were here.'

Doing a writing degree is much more difficult than I thought it would be. It's not that there's too much work, or that I can't keep up, it's just that it's a very emotional program to follow. Whereas with accounting or chemistry you have to learn rules and how to apply them, the main lesson in creative writing is that there are no rules. Fifty years ago it would have been more stringent. The teachers may have given more structure and had certain beliefs about what is proper writing and what is garbage.

There is, to be sure, bad writing. It's out there and you usually know it when you see it, but there are no rules for the good writing either. Forget plot, forget character, forget traditional narrative. Use fragments, distort time, switch perspectives, extend metaphors, experiment with magic realism. There isn't anything you can't try.

I wonder if schools have any business at all teaching writing for a degree. I can understand getting together with a writer's group, as a hobby, to learn from one another and get fresh ideas. But how do you grade creativity? And how do you learn from other people when you think they're idiots?

I sit in these classes each week as other students workshop what they've done. It's always a mixed bag. Some of it is quite good, and that discourages me because it seems to come so naturally to them. A lot of it is self-indulgent, memories of childhood, of rejected love, of depression and self-doubt. If you were to pick these things up in a book store as part of a book of short stories, or if you came across them in a literary magazine, you might enjoy them. You would be impressed with the language and the use of voice and the writer's ability to draw you in. But when you're sitting there looking at the author, who has just told someone else that she disapproves of their use of excessive adverbs, it's hard to take her piece about conversations with angels very seriously.

When I've been told that something I've written is good, that someone enjoyed it or that they would like to read more, it's incredibly exciting. I feel proud and accomplished and headed in the right direction. But all it takes is for one person to say, 'Well, I mostly liked it, except for this one part...' and it's totally dispiritng. Is that a word? I should probably know. It doesn't feel so much like failure as it does a broken heart. You've put yourself out there and you're being turned down in a way, told what you've done isn't enough. I can see why writers are such a neurotic, depressed, abusive lot. When your life goes so quickly from high to low, there's no other way to deal with the trauma than to acquire some kind of bad habit as a coping skill. I've gotten off easy I think. I've turned to chocolate. Where I used to have maybe a bag of M&Ms a couple of times a week, I can now finish a king sized bar of chocolate daily, and maybe go back for more. Luckily I have the free time to exercise it all off, so it balances out.

There's a bunch of theory about the nature of writing courses, but theory bores me, which is also an issue. I can only sit for so long listening to someone spout off about post-colonial fantabulism and it's ties to identity and hybridity before my eyes glaze over. These are the same people who value ironic distance over all else, and who I think need to get over themselves. I don't think I would survive long in the academic world before alienating those around me. It's all just too pretentious.

Still, have I learned something from all of this, yes. And although the experience has sometimes discouraged me from writing, as is evidenced by the huge gaps in my appearances here, overall I think it has encouraged me to write more. Maybe not share as much, especially with girls who write about angels, but at least write for myself, and the few people who I know will always say nice things to me :)