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This episode talks about the creative writing course I took in college that ended up derailing me as a writer for years. Come with me as I tell the tale and what I eventually learned from it years later.
The personal podcast for Ian MacTire, writer / podcaster / werewolf. This podcast follows my journey from first draft to published novel and beyond.
If you're a return listener, welcome back, if this is your first time, welcome! I hope you find the information in these episodes to be useful. Also, if you are enjoying these, please leave a review and share with others.
This is Episode 3, where I will be talking about what happened in the writing class I took in college. If you listened to the last episode, you will know that I made mention of a short story writing class I took in college that ended up derailing my writing for several years.
One of the questions that gets asked by a lot of people is whether they should take a writing class, or get a degree in writing. The answer generally seems to be that it's up to you to decide. These days, there are plenty of articles, YouTube videos, and podcast episodes that will tell you the pros and cons of taking classes. If you're wanting to know if taking one or more classes are for you, feel free to search these things out. In a nutshell, it's up to you, but it's not required to be a writer, and when taking classes, take from them the useful information and discard the rest. One piece of advice I can definitely give? Don't let any teachers discourage you from writing, regardless of whether you are doing it for fun or with an eye towards eventually seeing your stories published.
With that, lets jump into our time travelling DeLorean, or our TARDIS, or head to the nearest Circle K and get in the time travelling phone booth, and let's go back to a time when Google , YouTube, and podcasts had yet to be invented.
It was 1990-something and I had been out of the military for a few years. I decided that I was finally ready to go back to school, so I enrolled and began to get my learning on. At the time, you would have major sheets that would tell you how many credits in each discipline you would need, and which classes would count towards those, in order to graduate. To be clear, I never went with the intention of getting a degree in anything writing related, but I would find out that a short story class would count for one of my electives.
"Great!" I thought. "This will help me get my writing ability back!"
If you listened to the last episode, you'll have heard me talk about how I felt as though I had lost my ability to write after being in the military. This class would be my ticket back, especially since it was being taught by a published author. I'll admit right now that upon finding this out, I immediately set out to find her works so that I could familiarize myself with them, not so much as a way to get in good with the teacher as it was to see what she was writing and what I could expect. I found absolutely nothing. I don't know if this was because her published work was some short story in some student newspaper or because I was just simply unable to locate it. For all I know, it was some kind of travel guide. Her husband, who also taught at the college, was a published author whose claim to fame was a travelogue about great places to hike or camp or something in California. Certainly nothing related to writing fiction. Back then, we had brick and mortar stores, and I don't remember if Amazon was founded yet, but if it was, it had not yet become what it eventually would be. All I can say is that no bookstore could locate any author with the name of my teacher and self publishing was not a thing the way it is today.
So I showed up for class the first day, eager and willing to have a lost talent restored to me. The class was basically her talking about writing stories, and us students writing stories that we would share with the class. The class was made up of about seven of us, five women and two men (myself included). The other guy was younger than I was by a couple of years, and he was fresh out of the military. These details are important, so remember them for later.
That first week, we would listen to the lecture, then we would get time to work on our stories. We were given guidelines, and I was planning on writing a vampire story, but alas, one of the guidelines was no horror. Among the other guidelines was that it was to be a character piece, with the story being written from the point of view of that character, and it had to be outside of our own personal experiences. So basically, we couldn't talk about being a high schooler, or for me and that other guy, someone in the military. The goal was to learn to write to capture people's imagination and make them believe what they were reading while not necessarily being an expert in the subject.
I eventually chose to write a story about a boxer's last fight. The story took place in the locker room, right before the fight. He was past his prime, and he had one last shot. I described the nervousness he was feeling, the pressure to perform and make it as a champion at least once, and I used the word "fuck" one time, and that was the only swear word. It's very important that you know about this one swear word, which will become clear momentarily. Why did I choose this? Well, it was the furthest thing from anything I knew, and no one was going to mistake me for a down on his luck boxer hoping for one last win.
Eventually, it came time to share with the class. The five girls all came up with stories that were basically them in high school (they all set their stories in high school for some reason, despite being told not to), and the teacher praised them and told them what good writers they were. Not one of their stories was any good. It was almost painful to listen to as it was basically high school girl gossip, the kind of stuff you might read in a high school girl's diary, complete with the valley speak that had become popular at the time. As each of their stories was read, I became even more proud of what I had written. It wasn't because those stories were terrible, although they most certainly were, it was that in comparison, mine wasn't really all that bad. Maybe I hadn't lost my talent after all!
When my turn came to read my story, I read it with pride. I also tried to put some effort at using my voice to convey the pressure and the world weariness that this boxer felt. When I ended it, I waited for the teacher to tell me how well I had done. Instead, she told me that if I was going to pass her class, I would need to do much better, that she didn't know why I was writing about a down on his luck boxer since I obviously knew nothing about that and that writer's should write what they know, and that it was low brow to use swear words. "But Ian," I hear you say, "didn't she give instructions that it couldn't be something you knew?" Confusing, I know. That being said, I felt so defeated that day, and just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it most definitely did.
Finally, it was young soldier boy's turn to read his story. His story was about a Vietnam vet, fighting in the Vietnam War, and literally every other word was a swear word. When I say literally, I mean it in the very definition of the word. As in, "the food will literally be hot when it's fresh out of the oven", not as in "My day was so tiring, I'm literally dead". So when I say every other word was literally a swear word, I mean it. If you stripped his story of swear words, it would be half the original length. So this guy proceeds to read this out loud, not censoring a single thing, not even the dreaded "c" word that rhymes with "punt". As he's reading this, I'm expecting him to get reamed even harder than I did.
He finishes reading this atrocity and the teacher just falls all over herself to tell this guy how amazing his story is, how she felt like she was right there in the rice paddies beside his character, and the other women in the class joined right in on it. I couldn't understand it. How did my story suck so much ass, to the point where I was going to have to work harder in order to pass the class, that I was so low brow for using a single "fuck", and this guy is getting accolades like he's the next fucking Charles Dickens, all while using swear words to pad his story's length?
I thought briefly about talking to the teacher about it, but then decided not to because I didn't think anything useful would come of it. After all, if I was going to have to work harder, didn't that just underscore the fact that I had no talent? I left class that day and unenrolled from the course and never went back. And lastly, as a result of this? I literally stopped writing for several years.
Was it a mistake to have done that? Should I have stayed with it and maybe have the next story possibly be lauded? Maybe, maybe not. To this day, I don't think anything I would have done in that class would have made a difference. My point in telling you this story is to say this: Some people will love what you write, some people won't. The people who will love it, will find the good in it. The people who won't, never will. It could be the most amazingly written story that even the gods would be forced to glorify for all time and eternity as the perfect example of storytelling, and the haters will still find something to hate. So, if you do take a class or classes, don't let anything discourage you. Take the good, discard the rest.
As for me, I have now embraced becoming a writer and write mostly horror stories these days. I write what I want to read, what brings joy to me. At the end of the day, if none of my stories find fans, or make any money, I'll at least be able to die being proud of the things I wrote, instead of writing things that bring me no joy in trying to make the haters not hate.
That brings this episode to a close. Stay classy, and write those stories!
This has been another episode of Empty Pages. If you enjoyed what you heard and want more of it, you can follow me at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Please leave me a review, as that really helps me out, and if you do, you might find your review featured in a future episode. You can find me at ianmactire.com, as well as on Twitter and Instagram as @ianmactire. Until next time, I'm Ian, and this is Empty Pages. Stay classy and write those stories!