The chances that I will get into a creative writing class next quarter are quite slim because spots are few and aspiring authors far exceed their numbers, but I looked up the professors teaching Beginning Fiction tonight to see if I could read samples of their writing.
I found their blogs. Written in all the experimental syntax, the forced simplicity. It's hard to describe the tone, but I think you are all probably quite familiar with it; the best way I can describe it is, their writing brings to mind the artistic but not unhappy teenager who wants to feel everything and celebrate the joys of life in alternating long-short sentences that convey the urgency of their feeling. Dave Eggers, for instance, except I feel that Dave Eggers started the whole movement so he is spared from my condescension.
Either:
1. The turn-of-the-mill contemporary author conforms to a particular voice that happens to be the dominant one in this day and age (this is the "writing for an audience" argument);
2. Career fiction writers are people who never managed to grow up (this is apropos to an earlier post of mine);
3. My point of view is tainted due to my specific level of exposure and my particular position in literary history, and therefore my criticisms are not entirely valid (this is quite possible, especially compounded with the fact that I like to find faults in everything).
Regardless of what all of this actually says about these authors and popular literature in general, I personally would still like to get in to one of those classes before I graduate because my writing has genuinely degenerated since I stopped reading fiction circa 2007.
Also writing too many theoretically-grounded papers has destroyed my ability to communicate outside of a certain set of vocabulary and argumentative structures. Again, this might be indicative of my own immaturity.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
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