Undoing my "creative" writing class.

[icarus]

Dear f-list,

I need your advice.

A month ago I finished a creative writing class. The class went very, very badly, and I don't think I need to go into details now since I've spent many posts describing it.

What I need your help on is the after-effects of the class and limiting the damage on my writing. The symptoms are as follows:

From the antagonistic and undermining comments of the teacher (such as the classic, *snort* "and you wanted to NaNoWriMo...") I'm struggling with a separation between myself and the story, killing it with over-criticism before it can be written. How do I get rid of that?

From the heavy-handed "rules" orientation of the class, rules that I had to follow in order to survive the class with my grade intact, I'm now hyper-aware of "adverbs," and to a lesser extent, "summary," and "visual detail" in such a way that it's distracting and hard for me to finish a first draft without killing it. How do I remove those three months of training?

From the personal animosity he directed at me and at science fiction, I feel defensive and on the spot, focused on whether a story is "good" instead of just enjoying it as I have in the past. How do I counteract that oversensitivity to audience reaction? I've always written for the reader -- my first stories were oral, told to my friends as I made them up.

He did a lot of damage, more than I realized, and I'm not sure how to shake off the negativity.

Frankly, based on how he treated us, I have to assume that he's really not that good of a writer. How can he be, if this is any indication of how he squeezes out a story? If this is what he does to himself... *shudders* When I talked to him he had no writing projects going except for a creative writing thesis that he hadn't begun.

That's not a writer. That's someone who's "learned to write" and has found they "are good at it."

A writer needs to write. A writer can't stop the stories nibbling at their toes, or else they're bemoaning about writer's block and wanting to write. Or else they're stalled in that monolithic story.

I feel like I have had some sealant poured over my skin and I can't breathe.

There are several stories starving for lack of oxygen at the moment:

- A Christmas fic called "Silent Night" where John plays guitar for his team under the stars on an alien world

- The latter half of a story where John sleeps his way through half the Pegasus galaxy and the dire consequences come home to roost

- The next scene of Out Of Bounds, where John and Rodney make dinner and play

They're scratching and clawing to get out, they have complete outlines and they're started, but I can't seem to give them air.

Comments

[salixbabylon.livejournal.com]

*hug* Same as everyone else said. My experience writing when I felt demoralized after some harsh betaing was similar - I wanted to write but felt stuck, afraid. I worried about doing it wrong and my normal style was totally blocked.

So I took a long break. And then I wrote for me. Write with tons of adverbs, 3 per sentence. Write the purplest prose you can and indulge in feeling defiant. DOn't write with the goal of showing it to anyone, necessarily, just write for you, just get words on the page and let go of the sense of worry that it's not good enough.

Eventually, you realize that it bloody well *is* good enough. You rock.

*hug* (Lots of hot baths and port helps, too.)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to get into the "write for me" idea. It sounds selfish. Probably because ti doesn't have anything with how I started as a writer, telling stories to others. So whenever I hear that I think, "write for myself? What? Why?"

But I can understand the "write what you enjoy" idea. Usually, if you enjoy it, someone else will, too.

Icarus