So my time is running down to bitch about this writing class (I CAN SEE THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL, THE END OF THE YEAR IS SO CLOSE, GOD, I CAN PRACTICALLY TASTE FREEDOM) and I need to get some stuff off my chest here. An open letter to my class under the cut for ranting and cursing and general miscellaneous bullshit.
So first things first: far the fuck be it from me to judge your writing methods or style, but let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I work goddamn hard to give everyone an even-handed treatment when we do critiques, even the people who write stuff that I deeply loathe (have we covered the fact that the pretentious abstractist literary shit that everyone hails as ‘pushing the boundaries of narrative’ really gets under my fucking skin? Because it does, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get past it). I’ll admit that I’m generally a bit of a brass-bound bitch, in critiques as anything else, so I’m not going to sugar-coat something and if I think you really missed the mark, I’m going to tell you. But I try to be relatively decent about it. I’m not going to hand out backhanded comments about “Well, for what it is, it’s all right” or open with “I didn’t like Thing A”. I try to include a compliment, and I try to open with that compliment. And then I get critiques back about my writing that are ALL harsh criticisms, full of snide remarks about ‘I thought this was kind of a fun little young adult story’ and demands that I ruminate on the themes in my story at the price of the characters or the plot. Listen, folks, if I want to write things with plot and characters rather than sitting around and existentializing myself to death, that’s my goddamn prerogative, and I encourage you to critique my craft, not my genre, like I try to do for you. Writing fantasy makes me happy, all right, and I would go so fucking far as to say that it makes other people happy too, so I politely invite you to shove it so far up your ass that it tickles your goddamn throat.
Second of all, yeah I expect my readers to do a little work. If I include a couple words of German, you can either try to deduce them from context or you can Google them. If I include a reference to a fairy tale or a scrap of folklore that you’ve never heard of, you can look it up. If I include a line of poetry you’ve never heard, you can look it up. I’m not breaking some grand cosmic rule of writing by not dragging you through every meticulous detail of the plot by the nose, like a bull on a chain. The point of me including things like that, hints at the wider world, are to let you dream into it. Let your imagination run wild, wonder about the politics, imagine the thrones of the Faerie Court or the college classes in a city full of gods, spin backstories for characters, fall in love with something I only suggested in passing, make the story yours. That’s what stories are for, Jesus, they’re only real once they’ve been told, if you spin a story and you keep it clutched in the cage of your ribs, somewhere it can warm your heart, it’s not real. It’s my responsibility as the writer to create a world, it’s your responsibility as a reader to enter it. It’s a partnership. And yeah, sometimes that means you fucking Google a couple words of German or exercise a few of those basic reasoning skills. (Example: Vater? Star Wars exists, this is a thirty-year-old injoke that the world has with itself, Vader->Vater ->Father, what the fuck guys, I know I wasn’t using it in that context but THAT MUCH SHOULD HAVE BEEN OBVIOUS. And I know for a fact that I wasn’t that obscure about all of my historical/folklore references, because at least a few people managed the mental arithmetic.)
Thirdly, there are a few things that I’m pretty immoveable on, and the fact that you’re fighting me indicates that you actually know less on the subject than me and therefore you should sit the fuck down. The specific thing I’m talking here about is faeries. Faeries, historically, in proper folklore and not fucking Disney, are not human and consequentially do not act human. Watch Labyrinth, it will educate your dumb ass. Example: faerie love isn’t flowers and diamonds and self-sacrifice, faerie love is ‘love me, fear me, do as I say, and I will be your slave,’ faerie love is blood and broken glass, obsession and possession and craving. Another example: yep, faeries traditionally hunt people for sport, that happens. Is it universal? No, no it’s not. But it’s a thing that happens, and they taunt their prey, they play with their food, faeries are capricious and bright-eyed and wicked and outside our standards of right and wrong. So fight me. Come the fuck at me. And you’re going to sit there criticizing the fact that my faeries are ‘too unsympathetic?’ That’s the fucking point, you ink-stained uneducated chestnut, go read literally any collection of Celtic folklore ever. I mean, shit, I’m named after one of the only faeries who actively helps save humanity (Rhiannon, what up, still pretty pleased with that legacy), and even she is pretty fucking terrifying when someone fucks with her kid. On a related note, I stand by the fact that the desire to not fucking die is sufficient motivation to fight for your life, and if you want to be a pacifist that’s your prerogative, but killing in self-defense isn’t even a crime, let alone morally wrong. So, just as an announcement to my class at large, if your critiques orbited around any of this material, rest assured that I ignored it almost wholesale.
Fourth, I appreciate that editing is a necessary thing and there’s no such thing as a perfect story and there’s always room for improvement and on and on, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. I have a novel that’s been through about six rounds of editing and is being edited for the last time before I start pitching it to agents, and another novel that I’m going to edit this summer–I get that editing is a thing. That being said, I…don’t think that editing has to be “rip this down to bare bones and rewrite the story.” I just don’t. I’m still going to do it, because I need the A and apparently that’s the way to get it, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you feel like it’s going to help, yeah, do that, live your life, go for it. But if you feel like your story needs tweaking–adding a scene or removing a paragraph, shuffling dialogue, fixing blocking–then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s fine. Six rounds of editing has not yielded any ‘rip it down and rebuild it entirely’ stages for the one novel, all right, and by my standards it was a pretty shitty novel, so I’m going to go ahead and take that as an indicator that I’m right about this. So, yeah, I’m going to do what I need to do to get a good grade in this shit-storm of a class, but I’m probably going to be really dissatisfied with the ‘edited’ version and I’m going to hold a grudge on this one. Suck my metaphorical dick, prof, if you murdered a character and your editor made you rip shit apart, it’s because you didn’t know how the person died, what happened around their death, or even when it happened, and you tried to write it off as ‘part of the motif.’ That’s a you problem, not a me problem, and if you just don’t like my writing because…you don’t like it, that’s fine, whatever, I’m not going to be precious about this, but please fucking cease ripping up individual sentences from my writing in front of the class. It’s annoying.
Lastly, I want to extend my genuine gratitude to everyone in my class, for a few different reasons. Some of you had genuinely lovely writing, with engaging characters and thrilling universes, and I loved reading it, I’m honored to have had the opportunity. Some of you had well-executed writing that was beautiful, but not my thing, and I hope you find someone who loves the genre and gives you really helpful commentary, and I’m sorry it wasn’t me. Some of you really taught me WHAT NOT TO DO in a story. Some of you were, at the very least, a good object lesson in ‘how to not be a dick when giving constructive criticism,’ which I guess I’ll take as a silver lining–possibly learn the lesson yourself, because you made at least one person cry. And some of you, forgive me for this level of arrogance, at least did wonders for my self-esteem, because I have a whole new level of appreciation for the way words fit themselves together effortlessly on my tongue and characters spill from my fingers and worlds knit themselves whole at a glance. I feel a lot less like an impostor claiming to be a writer and turning out bullshit. Don’t quit your day job, kids.
So. TL;DR: Fuck all y’all, except for the select few who were intelligent, logical, interesting, interested, and not jackasses. You know who you are. I’m not sure how much of your advice I’m going to take, but honestly how many of you can see enough past the fact that I write Bad Dirty Self-Indulgent Fantasy to take note of my comments on your writing?
*backflips out of this bullshit*
