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!)

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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.