the worst feeling about trying to draw is being a mediocre artist. You realize you’re not terrible and family and friends who can’t draw at all tell you all the time how amazing you are, but you, as the artist, have seen what amazing really is and you realize that it isn’t you.
Ah it still kills me that I can’t post writing anywhere without voiding its “virgin” unpublished status. I suppose I could post and remove, fuck posterity I won’t have. But my point is, art has a quantifiable outcome. This is the art piece, this is the scan I posted to my website to publicize my art and (presumably) my name. You can’t do that with writing, it’s just words. I can’t share it except in a 1:1 situation.
So as long as I’m not published, I look like the laziest sack of shit in the universe; a true worthless Liberal Arts major. Writing somehow has to go from my brain straight to the pages of the New Yorker or I am nothing and that is bullshit.
And you know i couldn’t pay people to take time out to read what I write.
Some poems from “B Is for Bad Poetry” by Pamela August Russell
Signs of an amateur: over-thinking. They teach me to deeply analyze stories, to really pull apart their craft and content cell by cell, and then they tell me not to think so hard about my own intent. Bullshit.
Hey, this is just the first page and a half of my creative writing final (and they’re still a bit rough). If anyone wants to take a look, could they tell me if the tense and POV are okay? First-person present can be tricky to read and I want to make sure it’s not too confusing.
[I am one of your followers, just reblogging to my writing blog]
The POV and tense seem solid. I didn’t get confused about time or place at any point, and I’m assuming the lack of contractions is characteristic. Sometimes the language gets a bit clunky without contractions, like in the line, “It is the type of private joke that is enjoyable when it was kept just so; private.” You could pull some of the diction out with, “It is the type of private joke that is only enjoyable when it is private,” but something about the lack of “it’s” still makes it awkward. That “was” in there could also be “is.”
Minor typo in “I feel delight in the first time in a longer than I can remember.”
You could trim some of the sentences down and combine them, especially in the paragraph where Harahel describes her memory. I’d cut, “as it would be to denounce something created in the image of perfection.” It’s meaningful after the reveal, but it feels clunky on first read.
This got unnecessarily critical. I like the direction it’s going, more innovative than a lot of peer stories I’ve read this year. Good luck with it.
Whoops, I started an experimental second/first person piece that’s more poetic than narrative, when I should be writing some bland and emotionally detached Story for seminar. Because I’ve never met a bunch of writers with so little willingness to move past their own boundaries and character preferences. But I’m generalizing, it’s only about four people like that. They’re also the loudest and most opinionated.
Oh well, I’ll probably just write it for fun and won’t submit it to seminar or workshop. My theory behind the piece is more interesting than the piece itself. Sign of an amateur, I guess.
So stupid shit was going on in [TAG] guild chat last night and I hear I may have pissed somebody off by joking around at them but seriously
The idea that there is some vast, impassable chasm between men and women and all female characters must be written with some mysterious, ineffable ~feminine~ quality to them…really gets under my skin? (I mean especially as a person of not-exactly-binary gender but that’s a whole different ball of wax).
I’m sorry but, regardless of what you’ve heard to the contrary, you should be writing female characters the same way you write male ones - that is, as characters, i.e. individual people with their own temperaments, quirks, likes and dislikes, phobias, issues, passions, etc, etc.
The only place where the character being a woman should enter into it is when you ask yourself three questions:
How does the world she lives in treat her differently because she’s female?
How does this effect her, as an individual?
How does she then react, as an individual?
That’s. Seriously. It.
Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act.
“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is,” Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester explained in their study. “That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.”
Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical. In other words, the differences between men and women should be viewed as a matter of degree rather than a sign of consistent differences between two distinct groups.
Suck on THAT, Suzanne “men and women are equal but different” Venker.
