RE: intelligence of the author vs. intelligence of the characters

I'm having some email problems lately, mainly that I exceeded my space limit
on my college's server so for a while I couldn't receive any email and I'm not
sure if the emails I sent out actually went out. Did the list receive my last
post copied below? If not, then here it is. Sorry if this is a repeat.
-Levi

>Just a bunch of pretentious wanna-bes who >should be writing from their
hearts not from some manual dispersed by a failed writer (most likely a
professor or two of creative writing or the like}.
>

I agree that writers should write from their hearts of better yet with care,
but I don't agree that the only teachers of creative writing are failed
writers. I have a professor or two who are lesser known poets but they have
won a few awards and been published in magazines such as this list's heralded
New Yorker that is often mentioned. To me, that is success. Maybe as a
senior in college that seems like quite a feat and to all of the other
accomplished (i mean accomplished in the sense that getting published in
respected media) writers on this list that isn't much. I look at this kind of
like I look at a few of my little league baseball coaches or the guy on the
sidelines drawing up plays in a football game; they may not be able to hit a
ground ball or make a tackle but they can teach it, they can help someone
develop. Isn't this similar to an editor or a publisher in a way?

>Great writers write from experience, such as Conrad whom spent most of his
>youth at sea.

I love Conrad, but I read some sci-fi and I know of some wonderful authors who
write about stuff like having a microchip implanted in their skulls and they
probably are not writing from "experience." From themselves, from their
imagination and maybe their experience. Maybe they had a dream where they
were given a nanotech bed to sleep on and I suppose that would count as
experience, but the above statement is pretty limited.

I know very little about the "MFA" programs being batted around on this list
nor what the MFA actually stands for. Forgive my ignorance.

Having said all this I will say one last thing. When someone mentions "great"
writers I think of fiction authors as well as non-fiction authors. This is
probably because I am history major and read more than my fair share of
non-fiction. I am currently reading The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman and
in the Foreword written by Robert K. Massie whom I have never heard of he
says:

"She did not have a Ph.D. "It's what saved me, I think," she said, believing
that the requirements of conventional academic life can stultify imagination,
stifle enthusiasm and deaden prose style. "The academic historian," she said,
"suffers from having a captive audience, first in the supervisor of his
dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning thepage
has not been his primary concern." Someone suggested that she might enjoy
teaching. "Why should I teach?," she responded vigorously. "I am a writer! I
don't want to teach! I couldn't teach if I tried!" For her, a writer's place
was in the library or the field doing research, or at the desk, writing.
Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, MacCauley, and Parkman, she noted, did not have
Ph.D.s."

I wanted to put a quote in here that I rememeber reading somewhere about the
responsbility of a writer being to....write. That that responsibility to
encourage people to think and evolve is inherent in being a writer. However,
I can't recall what book I read that in recently. It was wither Vonnegut's
"Cat's Cradle", Paul Auster's "City of Glass", a book on Afghanistan,
Nietzsche, or "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson and I'm not going to sift
through them to find it. Maybe someone on the list has an inkling of what I'm
blabbering about.

Check out my site at http://ruonthelevel.com/
and if all else fails try http://ruonthelevel.no-ip.com/

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH

Check out my site at http://ruonthelevel.com/
and if all else fails try http://ruonthelevel.no-ip.com/

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Tue Sep 3 23:10:09 2002