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

Yep, Levi, I remember reading the post below.

And Matthew -- that's some success story ;)

Jim

lray wrote:

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