snap!

[adelaidesean]

Of his experience studying English at university level, Garry Disher says (in the latest issue of Lumen, the University of Adelaide Alumni Magazine):

"I hated it. Back then I was already keen on becoming a writer, and it seemed to me that English was going to ruin my love of reading and books. I found the analysis of the novels we were reading too academic, too difficult, and in some respects wrong-headed. But I was just a kid, what did I know? I wasn't ready for that way of looking at literature."

I had the same experience at high school. It feels very weird to be a PhD candidate now.

(Received my first knock-back for a conference paper the other day. It didn't occur to me that by entering this world I'd be opening myself to rejections from a whole new sector!)

----------------
Listening to: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie - How Close Your Soul

Comments

[callistra.livejournal.com]

I've only just realized the other day that one of the reasons I stopped writing so much was the negative, un-supportive, and downright nasty comments I would get back on my essays and papers at uni.

[maelorin]

i try to make my comments as constructive as possible for exactly that reason.

i *did* get a bit of notoreity in my undergrad days for publishing comments on an essay of mine by a tutor (now full professor) verbatem in a student publication. [apparently it was ok for them to write it on my work, not ok for me to comment on theri comments in another place ... :p]

i enjoy writing too much to take no for an answer. pity most of what i write is not for human consumption (i'm an academic-lawyer-in-training ^_^)

[if only i could do dialogue ...]

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Nothing kills the urge to write faster than feedback like this. I almost quit writing back in the early 1990s for just this reason.

[maelorin]

i'm about to try for my fourth serious publication ^_^

a week to write it in, in hopes of a seat at a conference in a month's time.

i'll know in two or three weeks time if it makes the cut ...

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Good luck with that.

It's such a weird process, writing an abstract etc. Still, nice not to have to write the entire paper before submitting it. That saves a certain amount of time. :-)

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I find abstracts much easier to write than outlines for fiction pieces.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

It's the style I'm not used to, I guess. Fiction writing, even in synopsis, has a very different rhythm to academic writing, and a much looser focus. I find it a lot more difficult.

I guess I've only done one so far. It'll probably get easier with practice.

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

it seemed to me that English was going to ruin my love of reading and books

My experience entirely. When I finished high school, I didn't touch a piece of fiction for many, many years. How I hated that analysing!

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I studied John Wyndham's The Chrysalids in year nine, way back in 1982, and still haven't been able to re-read it. There must be a better way to go about it...

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

LOL!

As author, I'd be worried that some English teacher decides to study your work in class, and you'd have thirty students going: oh no, no way I'm ever reading (insert name of author) again!

In this way, my kids have developed a solid hate for Bridge to Terabithia which is being flogged to death in schools right now. They didn't even want to see the movie.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ah, it's a shame when good books are killed by school! There should be a law against it. Or at least a law forbidding the forcing of books on kids who already have a feel for what they like. They should be able to analyse a book they already know, perhaps, rather than be dragged kicking and screaming through something they're only going to end up hating forever.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with The Chrysalids and for many years considered it the least enjoyable of Wyndham's books. I now suspect it's probably the best (and I'm astonished that it's never been filmed).

That said, the only lit course I did at WAIT (now Curtin) was more useful to me as a writer than any of the creative writing courses, and I say that with all due respect to the damn good CW teachers I had there (de mortuis nil nisi bonum). The lit course, called Modern Novel or something similar, took us through one book a week and made us look at how authors had dealt with technical aspects of writing - passage of time in Camus's The Plague; chapter division in Catch-22; Arthurian allusions in Waugh's Handful of Dust; how Poe, King and Henry James had scared people; etc. Similarly, hands-on experience as an editor in the film course taught me more about screenplay writing than I could have learned from books.

Part of the difference is whether the students want to learn - and in CW classes, they usually do. How to make this work in high school, unfortunately, is beyond me - which is why I transferred out of a secondary teacher training course, but generally enjoy teaching at uni.

[nyssa-p.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I'm going through this now!

I'm studying for a bachelor of creative arts, majoring in writing, and the writing part so far is really....lame. All the advice given is so generalised as to be almost useless, and even at university level, people look down on spec fic (and they don't seem to have anyone who knows something about the genre).

The two pieces that I put in for the workshop, one was set in a sort of purgatory/limbo realm and in the other the character was dying, and the response to it was just "more scene!". Especially with the first one, as it was a prologue, I didn't want 5 pages of what flowers looked like (y'know, since there were none).

I was going to do a masters in creative writing afterwards, but I think a masters in editing and publishing will serve me better. At least in that I can relish in typography (mmm fonts....).

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

It can be tough at uni, certainly, when no one shares your own love for a genre. I was lucky in my Masters year: from a class of ten, eight of us were writing something speculative, so even though it wasn't our supervisor's thing, we had each other to get us through.

That said, the more I learn about this game, the more certain I am that the same rules apply to every genre and that the end result is identical: writers can write any way they want, as long as the reader is held tight within the story. Learning technique can help, even though sometimes what works in a particular mainstream story won't work in a particular SF piece. I reckon it's all good to hear at least once. Keep your eyes and ears open (as I'm sure they are) and exploit the knowledge later. :-)

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

I have an MA in English and have, over the years, considered getting a PhD. My final conclusion: No way in hell.

Not only is academia a dumping ground for every sickening minority stereotype known to man, the hireability of anyone with ANY degree in English is precisely one ten-thousandth of a point above zero.

If I had my life to live over, the one thing I would do different is MAJOR IN SOMETHING ELSE. Anything. Psychology. Geology. Information Technology. Basketweaving. Anything would be better.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

a dumping ground for every sickening minority stereotype known to man

It does seem like that sometimes. :-) But you could say much the same about every subculture. Writes, science fiction fans, even Numanoids. (Gasp!) Into every ivory tower, a little weirdness must creep.

It's never too late to go back to uni, I reckon. I plan to do a maths degree one day, or more music theory.

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Wow--that's odd: I was just at West Virginia University yesterday looking into a graduate program in math or music education! Every highschool within a hundred-mile radius of me is looking for a music teacher, and I do have a (http://www.myspace.com/derekcfpegritz) modicum of musical (http://www.myspace.com/retard2) experience (http://www.myspace.com/adoctrineofworks) to start with. Since I already have a BA and an MA, I would only need to take the core concentration classes and it would only take me at most two years to get it together. It's always good being multifaceted. And just as you said, it's never too late to take another swing through school. I once taught a lady who was going back to school to work on a nursing degree at the age of 58.

My problem with the ivory tower of academia is that it's not just riddled with a little weirdness (if it weren't, I wouldn't have any future there myself!), it's completely overwhelmed by militant idiots who have made liberal arts their personal platform for "social revenge."

I once investigated an English grad program at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most prestigious universities in the States, and before the program director asked me ANYthing else, he asked, "Are you a Marxist?"

"Are you kidding me?" I laughed. "Who the hell reads Marx these days aside from sociologists interested in the history of their field's ideas or political science majors?"

He then asked, "How about feminist criticism?"

"I could not possibly care less about feminist criticism." (Mind you, I don't find anything objectionable about feminist or, for that matter, Marxist criticism--I just have no interest in it at all.)

"Well, what about queer theory?"

"No interest whatsoever."

"Well," he asked, "what stand do you take on literature?"

"I don't take any stand. Words are just words. I usually do psychological or cultural criticism to see how works reflect either the psychological or cultural milieu of their times, but that's it. I don't have an axe to grind with 'the patriarchy' or 'the bourgeoise.'"

"Well, you have no future here," he snorted. "If you aren't going to help us expand our social-revolutionary goals, then you have no place here."

"See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya," I answered.

The liberal arts departments of almost every university in this bloody country have been completely overtaken by "social revolutionaries" who have no real interest in literature--they just use it as a tool to advance their ludicrous political ideals. There simply isn't room anymore for a fella who is neither a Marxist, a feminist, or a homosexual, but just an average bloke looking to write about how H. P. Lovecraft's alien civilizations were inspired by the social and political turmoil of the U.S. during the Great Depression.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Lawd. I can safely say that I've seen little evidence of this kind of behaviour at the U of A, so maybe you should come down here and teach. :-)

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

That's good to hear! Perhaps your subcontinent has actually ducked that particular bullet.

I'd gladly move to Australia if it weren't for the fact that every living thing on the damn subcontinent is poisonous in some way or another. Plus, I'd never get to see Devo again if I lived there.

[ladnews.livejournal.com]

Just got my tickets for the August 5 show. Woohoo!

Hopefully they survive the tour.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Whoops. Wrong account and wrong userpic!

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Oh, SNAP! I forgot that Devo is coming to Australia!

OK, that cinches it. I'm going to seriously consider changing hemispheres. Plus, being closer to Japan and China means a better chance of riding the first wave of the Singularity!

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I'm odd. I love doing the critiquing. It was the thing I was best at at uni. I enjoy exploring the ideas and the themes and the structures of books.

*goes away to hide*

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I detested English back in high school. I was fine at grammar and stuff (which I still think is the kind of "English" that should be compulsory at school - that and "ways of reasoning" type philosophy, not bloody literature) but hated memorising quotes, analysing texts that mostly I didn't want to read (or heck, analysing texts I did like!)

Mind you, I'm still not an author ;)

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Grammar is sorely under-taught at primary and high school level in this country. Amanda and I regularly rail about this fact until we're blue in the face!

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

So are good basic information skills.

Don't get me started.

[wandering-nomad.livejournal.com]

I absolutely loved my English classes in highschool, I loved my college writing and composition classes. But once we started hitting the literary analysis it absolutely killed my love for reading and writing. After my first literary analysis class it took me a good year and a half to get back into my normal habit of reading.

(also, I feel I should mention that I found this blog because my friend recommended the Geodesica books to me, good stuff!)

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words! Here's hoping those books are never analysed at school. :-)