The "We Love the Lit Ladies" Lounge

rock on. way to cover the field. ;)

my grad thesis was half a novel...something i wanted to complete for a long time but i think it's become something like the unfinished book in _wonder boys_.

were you in an mfa program? how'd you like it?

I loved it. Best three years of my life. It was intensive; we just didn't do an MFA we did an MA and MFA at the same time. Plus, I was able to teach 2 classes a semester for the University, so I actually got a full tuition waiver and 1k a month stipend. I met Pulitzer prize winning writers and work shopped with them. I also had the pleasure of studying under a Ruth Lilly prize winner who was awarded the Anthony Hecht prize while I was there, and that was just one of my profs. It was a great experience.
 
Outta my league here, fellas. <3 My measly short stories don't quite compete.
 
Outta my league here, fellas. <3 My measly short stories don't quite compete.

Bah, I never said that I was any good. I am a much better academic than I am a creative writer.....well, my short stories always seem to cause a visceral reaction in my female friends who read them, but that is a different story altogether.
 
Bah, I never said that I was any good. I am a much better academic than I am a creative writer.....well, my short stories always seem to cause a visceral reaction in my female friends who read them, but that is a different story altogether.

A wonderful talent to have, I would say.
 
heh, no league in my book, i'm just talking shop over here since...well...i appear to be a spectator elsewhere. *shrug*

funny, constantine, the writing angle never seemed to do tricks for me in and of itself...i could never really predict or explain what i was getting attention for. :p

Do you mean from the fairer sex, or just in general? It took me about a year and a half before I really found my groove. I was studying poetry as my emphasis, and I got really tired of free verse and started to write sonnets and other forms, usually in unusual ways. That started to get me some attention. As for the writing itself, I am never happier than when I am producing, but lately I just don't have anything that i have felt compelled to write about. Well, except for Kiwi. :)
 
heh, no league in my book, i'm just talking shop over here since...well...i appear to be a spectator elsewhere. *shrug*

funny, constantine, the writing angle never seemed to do tricks for me in and of itself...i could never really predict or explain what i was getting attention for. :p

It comes and it goes, heh.

and yeah, I know you weren't trying to.. ween out the weaker linker, or anything. :p Just stating my observations. I do love to write, but never had any formal training, aside from lots and lots of reading.
 
It comes and it goes, heh.

and yeah, I know you weren't trying to.. ween out the weaker linker, or anything. :p Just stating my observations. I do love to write, but never had any formal training, aside from lots and lots of reading.

Lots and lots of reading is the cornerstone of writing. One of my main professors used to say that you had to read everything if you wanted to be a good writer. You should really all of the greats, all of the goods, and all of the bads that you can find, and he said, the bads were the most helpful. 1) you can mine what they do for content only do it better, 2) you can see what they did to screw it up, and 3) it lets you realize what you are screwing up in your own work.
 
Oh noes too much smartness in here!

Must keeeeelllzz!

I'm trying my best to kill it, but they keep outsmarting me.

Lots and lots of reading is the cornerstone of writing. One of my main professors used to say that you had to read everything if you wanted to be a good writer. You should really all of the greats, all of the goods, and all of the bads that you can find, and he said, the bads were the most helpful. 1) you can mine what they do for content only do it better, 2) you can see what they did to screw it up, and 3) it lets you realize what you are screwing up in your own work.


I agree wholeheartedly. I have a hard time learning actual writing "mechanics" so to speak. Not... grammar, or structure, per se, but... Shit, I don't know how to phrase it. Let me think on it, heh.
 
that sounds like a fantastic experience. the merged ma/mfa sounds great--i had hoped to attend cornell and do something similar...the program i wound up in was fairly anti-academic, which was hard on me since i kept wanting to integrate the two.

if i did it over, i would probably actually do a straight lit degree and preserve writing as a concentration. there was a bit too much...vocational fencing at my program.

The MA/MFA combo turns out people who are on par with Ph.D. candidates in Creative Writing. As for the programs that are anti-academic....well, I don't have a lot of respect for their philosophy. While academics can fuck up a work, their attention to detail and their intense study is what allows writers to learn from the greats. If we don't study them in detail we can do nothing more than walk around in the dark bumping into the good ideas like a table in the middle of the room. Unfortunately, sometimes people take everything too literally and think that you have to do it EXACTLY like Yeats, or Keats, or Pound, or Eliot. Those folks have missed the point just as much as the people who believe that writing is nothing more than a free flow of emotional information that doesn't really have any central theme or purpose.
 
oh, i meant from women. the attention i get is wildly diverse in its sources and intensity, and i've never pinned it down to any one thing i do. i kinda wish i could just so i had a fallback angle. :p

i feel you on productivity. well, i don't really like my w/c. creating? that's closer to what i feel. creating is so integral to the human soul, however, whatever one makes. (that goes for you, shy!) it shakes me loose, cuts so many things adrift in an absolutely good way.

my predicament is more that i am compelled but another loud part of me suppresses me...there's that western split-personality thing again. i'm trying out this _artist's way_ book to see if i can crack out of my rut.

I shy away from most of those writing "how to" books. Especially the ones that give how an artist should work or view the world. I largely do this because I know one of the men who wrote one of those books. Not only is his book a fraud, he writes completely different than his supposed system, but when he was a professor he taught the polar opposite of what he puts forth in the book. This is not to say that there aren't some good ones out there, Trigger Town is especially good, but I find them hard to stomach, and generally I feel less inclined to create after reading them than I did initially, but that being said, I know people who take great solace from those works even if they never take any advice that is given in them.
 
imo that is hands-down the best education possible. in undergrad i had some really awesome profs, but i just read voraciously--did for about the first 20 years of my literate life--when i got to the writing program, i basically just spent 2 years experimenting with what i liked. honestly the professional structure, the 'teaching' of writing didn't do much for me at all...

That was one of the great things about the way my MFA was structured. Every week 3 hours of workshop, and then they threw all of us writers into a suite of offices together for our assistant ships, and we argued and we cussed at each other. Some folks were fucking in the offices, and we all drank too damn much, but we always talked about writing. We always critiqued each others works. The actual writing classes were more of summation periods for the discussions we were having outside of class. It was a phenomenal time.
 
Can someone post a blonde joke to dumb this thread down a bit so everyone else can feel a little more comfortable? :rolleyes:
 
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