Should I take advanced writing in college

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solwitch wrote:

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Well here I am, semester starts in a few days should I? I’m scared it will be difficult...

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Amusing fact for those who dismiss all Creative Writing degrees as the lowest of the low: I was doing both Philosophy and English classes to fill out the semester load most of undergrad. I considered it filler, mostly tapping what we'd already covered in Literary Theory to bullshit through.

Halfway through third year I was invited by mailed letter to join the honours program for both. In Australia, honours is officially post-grad, a full year devoted to a sustained thesis and maybe a major work. You typically don't bother unless you are aiming for a career in academics.

I'd already devoted my post-grad to Creative Arts/Creative Writing but it was a nice thing to see that whatever we were learning in lit theory was chunkier than Eng or Phi.

Of course, this is purely anecdotal. I benefited from a sleeper lit professor who was too lazy and too comfortable to seek a more ambitious career. And by lit I also mean literally: he turned up baked more than once. Fucking liberal arts academics...

Otoh I have heard CW courses at other universities can be utterly pointless, focusing far more on the practical side of writing and less on the theoretical, which imo is less apt to make people into best-selling authors than it is simply make them the product of too many amateur hour workshop sessions. I am a fierce elitist when it comes to theory in any creative pursuit: shoulders of giants and all that.

Advanced Writing, as mork said, tells us nothing. Advanced from what? What your average high school graduate can turn out? Heh. That was a woefully low bar back in 2005; something tells me it hasn't exactly risen much since then.

There is some overlap between CW and the more practical writing paths: several of my peers went on to do copy (poor fuckers), editing and journalism. One's a lawyer, having doubled. You should learn enough about grammar, composition, brevity...all that to at least not be turned away instantly. But of course there are dedicated journo degrees for that (coincidentally my prose teacher earned her phd in journalism but soon soured on the reality of journo life; truly a win foe the CW world).

Even the course I took 15 years ago is dead now. CW folded into Crearts such that visual artists have to take writing classes and writers have to take some other corequisites no doubt barely related to the creative writing pursuit. My old prose prof is doing her best to keep it all relevant but outside of the editing classes I suspect it's a losing battle.

But let's be clear on one thing: this is not the clear path to popular writing success. One need only read a few author blurbs in best-sellers to know that. And that's nothing new: from King to Grisham to Steele to Ludlum, it was less about letters after their name and more about interesting life experience turned into compelling stories...and the connections made along the way. University is almost never an interesting life experience ripe for narrative juicing.

If anything, proper "advanced" writing makes it that much harder to take the popular route: you will be unable to unsee how objectively bad some best sellers really are. Stow your ideas of art as always subjective; the divide between well-written and well-received is damn near irreconcilable. And there is a perfectly good reason for that: readers aren't writers. Give a reader a compelling plot and solid characters with good dialogue and they will not so much forgive bad writing as simply not notice it. A good creative writing degree WILL teach you all about those but it will also make sure you are aware of how to do it without so many of the awful elements pervasive in popular fiction. The aim is to make you a better writer, and part of that process is the almost esoteric revelation that many popular writers could be so much better if they had to be. If, perhaps, they had the luxury to be.

In case it weren't glaringly obvious I have my doubts as to the basic premise of this thread. No academic I've ever known would behave this way even if they stumbled onto a young prodigy. It is just really unprofessional to show such bias without rigorous examination. So my gut tells me this is all very Solwitch meta: a creative writing exercise to see if it can convince the reader that he is good enough to write a creative but convincing scenario in which he is somehow identified as a writing wunderkind. The only time I experienced anything like that was early on when I did a day session at a local community college run by a local author no doubt happy to BS for 4 or 5 hours for some quick cash. I had a gift and knew it. A gift for being a better writer than anyone casual enough to attend a day session at a local community college run by a local author happy to BS for 4 or 5 hours for some quick cash.

Outside that, I'd genuinely question the integrity and motive of an academic so easy with the praise for a nobody over a two page piece that sounds like a high school topic essay.

But I would love to be wrong, which is why I really want to read it! I want to see what had two professionals acting like gushing npcs in a wish-fulfillment Gary-Stu fanfic...the "you remind me of a younger me" cliche at the end was the topper for me.

As usual, when you call sol's bluff he fails to show his hand. You can do that online and not somehow gain a reputation for being a chronic bullshit artist. Kind of why I imagine we see so much of it here. Reminds me a certain Korean Poptart...