Subject: Re: bands of brothers
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 10:37:54 EDT
Scottie --
It's just not true that if it's not a masterpiece, it's not worth
writing. Fact is people read, enjoy, and even enjoy on a relatively
high aesthetic level work that isn't properly a masterpiece. It's
possible to write something that's very good -- even has literary merit
-- that's not "Anthony and Cleopatra" but says something important.
This type of thinking leads only to misery in whatever area it is
applied.
But more importantly, and more to the point, every author who ever wrote
a single masterpiece wrote a great many lesser works beforehand. I've
run writers groups before and yeah, it's really hard to tell a member,
"you don't have it and probably never will." It's even harder just to
tell them that their poetry sucks. Or even their one poem sucks. I
usually tell them they need to study other poets. Most people
mistakenly think that just because they're feeling something, their
feelings matter to readers.
FEELINGS AREN'T POETRY. Just wanted to get that out to poets out there.
Anyway, I agree -- there's an avalanche of crap out there. And I also
agree that critiques are often offered with wrong motives (yes, either
out of envy or fear of hurting the writer's feelings).
But there have been many times that, in the midst of all the BS, two or
three people gave me some pretty specific and useful direction about my
work. In almost every case they were **telling me what I already
knew.** But I needed someone to point it out to me before I could think
about it properly.
That's the advantage of a writers group.
I'd like you to think about what I said about writers groups not as a
negation of what you said, but an addition to it. Everything bad you
described is very much there. But that's just not the whole picture.
Jim
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