Wangst and weemo

[feuervogel]

I read a lot of writers' blogs. Or LJs, whatever. And I've started to feel like I'm inadequate and inept as a writer, because I wasn't an English major. I'm not Trained in things like Narrative Technique, Structure, and Symbolism, and I'm not well-read enough in classics, folklore, or myths to make use of Allusions.

I'm an impostor.

All I've got is some characters, a story idea, and 20-odd years of reading spec fic (and some Real Books™). No technique, no ideas for creative symbolism or structure or literary allusions.

I'm never gonna sell anything.

Comments

[feuervogel]

This could explain why some current SF writers' work feels somewhat ... pretentious? smug? Let's see how many references to things Well-Educated and Well-Read people should know I can work in to this manuscript! Which always leaves me feeling like an uneducated plebeian.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I think there's something to be said for knowing the craft. But you can learn any craft without formal training, and sometimes formal training can actually get in the way. Likewise, the more trained you are, the more likely you are to take that training to heart, and particularly since genre writing is always considered "beneath" literary writers, if that's what you want to do, you're unlikely to get a lot of help from an English department.

College doesn't exist to somehow magically let you learn things you can't learn elsewhere - it exists to provide what is necessary to teach what you can't seem to grasp on your own, and to give you a piece of paper that says you're competent at what you know. That piece of paper doesn't matter when you're shopping manuscripts around, only the knowledge does.

Then again, you're talking to a guy who cut a straight month of math classes at JC, so grain of salt. I still got an A when I came back for test days, though, so make it a small grain.

[feuervogel]

Dude, I went to my second semester German class on average once a week. (I had to take 210 and 220, for some unholy reason.) There were 8 people in the class, and I think most of us had the same schedule. Poor teacher guy.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Ah, see, I went to most of my humanities classes, because the discussion usually mattered. Plus, Klaus was awesome and jumped me to third-year German based on my entrance testing. It was cute, he had to hand-write the option on the bottom of the form so he could check it off.

But, at any rate, you have the experience to understand - the classes are there for when you need someone to explain things, not for all your learning. ;)

[feuervogel]

I didn't have that option. It was Annoying. (I did get to skip freshman English both semesters, though I heard that was mashed into some required 5-credit thing after I graduated, or around that time.) I slept through class, or skipped, and got As. Bah.

I didn't skip many classes, actually. Even my 8 am p-chem class when I was hungover.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Freshman English turned into College Writing Seminar (Proper name: Shit they damn well should have taught you in Highschool), which was bundled with Information Access (Subtitled: Mouse Use and Word Processing 101), and Extended Orientation (AKA: Don't get drunk and have promiscuous unprotected sex while high, mkay?). 5 credits, divided into 3 courses, and you were allowed 1 absence total in each, or you failed the whole goddamn five credits. And even though I had a 4 on the English AP, and a 5 on the CompSci AP, and the common sense God gave a dog, I couldn't get out of CWS, IA, or EO respectively.

My Extended Orientation session was 8:00 on a Monday. And, again, miss it more than once? Fail the things I should have tested out of on top of the thing that was no use to me. Yeah, not fun. At least the class eventually started meeting over breakfast in Baker.

Aside from that... well, in the MA/CS Department I was apparently known as "the best student you never see." It was a weird moment during the parent visitation thing in my first semester, because the head of the department knew me, told my parents about how well I was doing, and I hadn't had a class with her yet.

To this day, that's how I describe the JC to people - "A college so small, there were professors who knew my name, and I didn't know theirs."

[feuervogel]

What sort of bullshit nonsense is THAT? I remember pretty much all of us going "WTF? That's a stupid bullshit thing. Extended orientation? WTFery!" Do they still have it?

There was a woman MA/CS head? Oh, was it the woman with the dog? *avoided math and CS*

Also, LOL. Reingold did his damnedest to know everyone in Chem Concepts - like half the freshman class - by the end of the first week.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I have no idea if EO is still around. JC was aiming for a lot Changes that didn't appeal to me as I graduated, so I haven't really kept up. Plus, there was a lot of Drama about my graduation (I ended up having to argue my way to a diploma, a year late, because of credit transfer problems - they decided to change the way credits would transfer the year I went abroad and not explain that was the one place to ignore The Marburg Manual - and missing half a credit for the "Cultural Analysis" requirement due to living in a different culture during an American election year).

Not that I'm still incredibly scathingly bitter, or anything.

That was the one. I avoided names A) because I figured you wouldn't know her and B) for anonymity. ;)

The nice thing about JC was that, in my departments at least (CS/MA/DE) the classes never went much over 20 or so people, so we were all well-known. I also started in Calc II (multivariable), and had the same experience you did with DE210 etc - "Oh, this is exactly like normal calculus, but you ignore one variable and do it again ignoring another variable. See you next week."

I felt kind of bad sometimes, because my Calc II professor taught in the same room I had my Computer Organization class, the hour after I had CO, which was also the hour before I had Calc II. So he knew I was very much cutting his class, a lot. Thank the various gods he had a sense of humor about it.

One day, he asked if I was showing up for class later, and I asked him tocall a coin flip. He lost, nodded ruefully, and said "See you Thursday, then, maybe." Coolest. Prof. Ever.

[feuervogel]

WUT. Shit, I was in Marburg in 96. I watched the election returns on the kitchen TV at 7 am before catching a bus up to the chemistry building. They were probably a lot less depressing than finding out that wanker from Texas won...

I felt bad because I fell asleep in Klaus' classes a lot. Including the one where it was just me and this other guy. I had really bad sleep habits in college.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

2000, baby. I received a phone call at What-The-Fuck AM from a German friend to tell me that ZOMGWTFPONYBBQ AMERICA DOESN'T HAVE A PRESIDENT.

I woke up just enough to reassure him that, in fact, we had systems for this, and months to work it out, because instant tabulation was a pipe dream just a few decades ago, and to go to sleep. Little did I know at the time how much panic I should have felt. As it was, I had friends who hadn't lived in America since before the elections, and who voted Democrat, getting yelled at for Bush administration BS before we left in the Summer.

I never nodded off in Klaus' classes - but by the end, German Lit Since WWII, there were three of us, and it was embarrassing when we all admitted we weren't keeping up on the reading - there was no one to hide behind if you weren't ready for classes.

[feuervogel]

That's the scary part about small schools, and why I'm glad I went to one.