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

[luckykitty.livejournal.com]

Feeling you 100% :( That pretty much describes me to a T.

But honestly, I do wonder how many of these things really apply to all writers. It seems like they come from all walks of life and levels of education.

[intravenusann.livejournal.com]

I think that's ridiculous. I am an English major--hell, I'm an English major 'with a concentration in Creative Non-Fiction' and I'm trained in all that stuff and well-read in classics, folklore, and myths (not just the Western, Greco-Roman, Biblical stuff either), but honestly I feel like you have a much better chance of becoming an author than I.

I think about it and how many authors do I love who were actually English majors? None. Zip. Zero. How innovative are my fellow English majors? How innovative am I in a sea of other writers and English majors who wish they could be writers? Leads me to feel that people who write become authors and English majors become teachers and professors and perpetuate the cycle.

Rather than piddling away time learning How To Be Like Everyone Else In Your Department And the Mainstream of Respectable Fiction and Non-Fiction That No One Ever Reads, you learned actually useful things and lived a life and read stories which were enjoyable--which I think gives you Something to Write About. Everything else is practice, persistence, and luck.

Also, this:



I hope it cheers you, since that was the intention. I'm probably bitter myself and I hope that doesn't overpower an effort to cheer.

[chris-smith-atr.livejournal.com]

Bollocks. I'm not trained. And in all seriousness if you can get yourself one hell of a editor who understands your brain (poor thing in my case) and can recc you books about that sort of stuff -- you don't need to be. Yes it is harder work, yes you'll prob make the same stupid mistakes that I do. But the MOST important thing about writing is that you have a story to tell. The rest can be taught. That spark that makes something interesting can't. In my opinion of course.

[pharna.livejournal.com]

I feel you with 2D artwork. Sure I've had some formal training and all, but proportions are still a little iffy, lighting? REALLY iffy. Composition? Passable. Speed? I'm a goddamn snail, I take 4 hours to make what some genius kid shats out in what, 20 minutes?

I found this site and just nearly died.
http://iradukai.com/making/550/fuzitop.html

This site has a bunch of how tos that make me feel like an incompetent tard.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

You don't need a degree or help from so-called experts to read. A lot of what an English degree does is simply to put names to a lot of things you already knew by osmosis.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare didn't major in English. Neither did Hemingway.

Neither, for that matter, did Asimov, Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp or J.K. Rowling.

Some things you don't need school to learn. Some things that teachers insist on are wrong anyway. Good writing isn't all about following the Rules.

What you're doing is reading the work of people who're actually working in the field, many of whom also got the classical education. That actually puts you one up on those who just had the education, and certainly one up on losers like those folks up top, who didn't do either. ;)

[feuervogel]

Avenue Q makes everything better.

You make good poetry. It's kinda depressing, but that means you can evoke emotions well. (I'm thinking about one you posted earlier this year about living in Guam.)

[feuervogel]

I don't even know what structure *means* in this context. Like, I learned the 5-part plot thing in, uh, middle school? (opening, action, climax, denouement; I'm clearly missing something there, since I have 4 words written down), but aside from that, what's structure in a narrative?

It's like, I don't know all these things I feel like I should know, or that would enable me to be more critical or proactive or something when I'm writing, rather than just putting words on paper in order (then going back and filling in where more words need to be.)

[feuervogel]

I know there's no One Right Way to do writing, but god I feel like such a poseur.

[feuervogel]

My brain is a very strange place, and my weemo surely isn't helped by the part of my brain that wants to name things and put them in ordered little boxes. (I'm a sensing-thinking-judging type, and having read what that means on a couple MBTI sites, everything makes so much sense now.)

But how do you know if something is interesting? How do I make this idea into something people would want to read? *sigh*

[feuervogel]

I like knowing the names of things. I may or may not make use of this knowledge, but having it, and being able to say, "oh, this is X" can help.

I occupy a weird intersection between organic writing and ordered. I have no idea how to explain it, though. Like when I learn taiji, I can learn the postures and form, but if I want to improve, I have to know why I'm doing, for example, single whip or cloud hands. I need to know the application, the why.

I'm terrible with theoretical *everything.*

[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.

[feuervogel]

OMG. People like that are the reason I gave up trying to learn to draw. (That and I couldn't make myself slog through the penciling and stuff, because I want it done NOW, why can't this be as easy as writing?? ¬_¬)

[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.

[chris-smith-atr.livejournal.com]

Oh I am very much an INTJ or ENTJ (depending on when I take the test) so don't worry :)

Interesting for me is when the story is pulling you forward. For instance I don't really LIKE the character I'm writing from First Person POV at the moment but he fascinates me by being very much himself. The story started out simple but things kept on piling up and sub-plots developed of their own accord. Everything is tying together perfectly -- like it would not in real life -- and all leading to the denoument.

That is what I call an interesting story. It also helps that the feedback I receive is positive. I have two very trusted friends whom I've known since fandom-days who're more than willing to tell me "this is shite."

So, write what makes you want to write and have good people who'll call a spade a spade in summary. :)

[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.

[feuervogel]

I'm an ESTJ.

Maybe if I get further into this stupid thing (I have 2000 words. With a target of 90000... ;_; ) I'll feel better. I sure hope it gets/stays interesting...

[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. ;)

[chris-smith-atr.livejournal.com]

If you're very "I want to know where I'm going" have you ever tried to outline. It does not work for me fully (in that I tend to completely re-write my outline after every chapter) but it gives me a sense of knowing where the end is....

Feel free to post in meta_writer if you want tips from people who are a lot saner than me :)

[feuervogel]

I'm trying an outline this time, since I've never used one before, and I've wound up getting mired in plots that make no sense and require rewriting heavily.

Of course, it's also possible that I'm bored of it, because I know where it's going and how it ends. I've already procrastinated over an hour with the file open on my desk.

[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."

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Huh, and here it never even occurred to me to consider myself inadequate or inept as a writer because I am not an English major. It boils down to your ability to tell a story.

The thing to bear in mind is, you're not writing literary fiction, bb, you're writing genre fiction.

Nobody is going to deconstruct your work and inspect it for literary devices until your work becomes very popular and is considered groundbreaking or classic for genre fiction. AND EVEN THEN I find people will pick up far more meaning from your work than you consciously put in. =p

[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.

[feuervogel]

Some modern genre writers are very enamored of Structure, Narrative Form, and Deconstruction of Tropes. People love them. They win Hugos. (Also, apparently, Purple Lyrical Prose is the big thing these days.)

I'll also never be considered a Good Writer because I don't like killing off my characters.