Future Playa Hatin

[Brasil]

Pardon the cheesy thread title. I felt it suited the subject matter.

This is a peculiar question, but has anyone had a very distinct idea for the future hit them? By this I mean, has something regarding your future, whatever your future may be, ever just really slapped you in the face? Just a very real knowledge of what your future will hold for you? Now, I'm not necessarily talking about predicting or anything. I'm more just focusing on...call it an epiphany, I suppose.

I had one yesterday, as I was on the train to class. In my Fiction Workshop, we were having a class critique, and I was reading through one girl's piece. It was only three pages long, but I found myself marking it up with copious amounts of ink. It was as if I was striking something, writing a note in the margin, or simply "Show don't tell" nearly every other line.

I know I'm going to be the type of instructor that students either love or hate, but I have a feeling my Comp courses are going to actually prepare students for college and higher-level Lit courses. I'm going to be such a beast when it comes to writing. My students are going to so hate me, lol.

[ChibiHorsewoman]

[color=darkviolet]Well, kind of.

It was back in November 2003 when I was commenting on being pregnant and spending next thanksgiving playing with my baby. Then poof, January 19th comes along and I don't have my monthly annoyance. A week later I find out I'm pregnant.

Then after I told Lincoln we concentrated more on girl names than boy names. Then one of Lincoln's letters to me said something about our daughter (this was back in march 2004) And then April/May rolls around and the ultrasound shows a girl.

Oh and around December of 2003 I kept telling my best friend who was 7 months along that she was going to have her daughter on the 29th of February and I was going to laugh at her because her daughter would only have a birthday every 4 years. Well, wouldn't you know it, the 28th of February I'm coming out of a resturaunt in Texas and I tell Lincoln that I think Becky (my friend) is having her daughter the next day-little do I know that she's in labor-then when I land in Buffalo the next day, my dad lets me use his cell to call Becky and I get her boyfriend instead. He tells me that Becky is in labor. Then at 9:08 PM EST Becky has Alicia.

Oh, and I think you'll make a great teacher, just watch out for those crazy parents who don't think their kids should be pushed or scolded...I won't be one of them. :animesigh [/color]

[Arcadia]

[QUOTE=Siren]I had one yesterday, as I was on the train to class. In my Fiction Workshop, we were having a class critique, and I was reading through one girl's piece. It was only three pages long, but I found myself marking it up with copious amounts of ink. It was as if I was striking something, writing a note in the margin, or simply "Show don't tell" nearly every other line.

I know I'm going to be the type of instructor that students either love or hate, but I have a feeling my Comp courses are going to actually prepare students for college and higher-level Lit courses. I'm going to be such a beast when it comes to writing. My students are going to so hate me, lol.[/QUOTE]
[size=1]I would love to hate you if you did that to my paper. I agree entirely, though - you're not going to learn anything if your papers aren't properly graded. Especially in lit classes - the entire thing is about words, damn it. You're going to learn to use them, and you're going to like it.

The "show don't tell" thing made me laugh because I hear that every day in my fiction technique class. It's so awesome. I was talking to Shy about this before, but it's really amazing to see how much my style has changed already because of this class. I'm approaching stories from a whole new perspective, and it's awesome. ^_^[/size]

[Semjaza]

At the same time, I have to wonder how much writing is ever going to evolve if people are continually forced to comply to specific methods. It hardly seems likely that Shakespeare, Thompson or countless others would have come into existance if they were made to stay within the boundaries of the time periods they were writing within, whether it's literature, journalism or anything else. This applies just as well to random modernist movements that pushed art in general around early last century.

I don't like that aspect of writing or art or music, even though I find myself critiquing all three of them as anyone else would. There are always suggestions and there are always ways to improve things, but I wind up feeling like everyone tells me to do what [i]they[/i] would do if they wrote it, rather than what would make my work more effective in general. I don't find that very encouraging or insightful, to be honest. I get this a lot with websites, as that's my main creative output... Some people give you pointers and some people wind up telling you to do it in a way that they consider "correct". I don't find the latter to be that constructive, personally.

I'm just saying this as a general comment on how things went for me in school and everyday life. I have no idea what sort of things Alex or Megan or any other person who would be interested in teaching would go about their grading policies. From what I know of them, I doubt they'd fit into this category of person I'm "complaining" about anyway. At the same time, one can take another's input and use it or ignore it at their own discretion (and people, in general, tend to respect that), so a lot of what I'm saying it probably pointless lol.

[Brasil]

Well, Tony, one of those "specific methods" is "Show don't tell," and I think it's an important idea to impress upon students, because otherwise, we're not seeing any real character development, or any real action. If a student writes "His inner monologue is screaming," I think the instructor definitely should mark that and suggest some revision, because there's no information being conveyed. It's simply just telling what's going on, without showing it on any level at all.

And I think one of the main reasons that crit is necessary is writing is a tool. As much as people use it for an outlet of expression, it's still a tool for language, for communication, and when someone can't read a work because it's so jumbled, rambly, outlandish, or the language used is too obtuse, I don't think enforcing a specific standard is really such a detriment.

Not to belabor this point, but in the past few years, I've seen how uncontrolled writing can go horribly, horribly wrong.

This semester, in my Fiction Workshop, there's a guy, Steven, who's a really nice guy, and very smart, but he writes like he's from another dimension, and a very verbose one at that. His work is laden with run-on sentences, hyperbolic adjectives--the language of the entire piece is hyperbolic. My classmates were able to only get through the first two pages, and I only waded through the first four before I couldn't stand it any longer.

A few years back, for another Fiction Workshop, I had submitted a portion of EPICITY, the modern day epic poem I've been writing for the past 7 years, and only one of my classmates was able to understand it, because she was sitting next to me in the comp lab when I was writing it, so I was explaining it to her. Everyone else put the story down after a few pages.

In that same Fiction Workshop, one of my classmates wrote in a style similar to Romantic literature. At first, we thought it was a joke, like it was satire, but he was serious. It was written beautifully, of course, and it was easy to understand, but even when it was understandable and readable, it was still out of control, because, like Steven, the point, characters, and setting of the story were often lost in the language...lost in translation, if you will.

I didn't mean to go on this much here, but I think there is a line between poetic license and BS, and I think that line needs to be clearly defined, and when that line is crossed, I think it's prudent and appropriate to pull that piece back to poetic license. I get the sense that a lot of the so-called, self-proclaimed "boundary pusher" or "avant garde" writers are simply trying to pass off BS in the name of poetic license.

Yes, there is a place for unconventional writing and boundary pushing...but even then, I think that writing needs to be accessible to the reader. Yes, I enjoy writing EPICITY, but even I know that it's a work tailored specifically and exclusively for a very particular group of people, so I'm not going to get pissed in a workshop when the piece gets torn apart, or criticize the workshop/crit process.

I don't view things as requiring a set standard, or even setting an unreasonable standard. I simply view the editing/crit/workshop process as something to improve the accessibility of language.

You weren't implying anything quite like that, I know, but I just wanted to make a bit of an addendum here.