Yeah, yeah it's been a while but no one reads this thing and I wish I had more views so people might notice. Blah.
I'd like to talk about a brief time in which people took noticed because they had to. People paying attention, nay, discussing me? It gets better. This place was in a college classroom. Did this just turn into one huge non-sequitur in the style of the Twilight Zone? Well, kind of. My first semester at college I took English 315: Writing Fiction, and it was the best time I ever spent at college. I didn't think college could be so good. Why?
Well, that's kind of interesting. See, it's a pretty awkward moment when you walk into a class with an X-Wing t-shirt and one of the first things that gets said is "this isn't a class for writing science fiction or fantasy." Normally, this would totally blow my bubble, but I actually took it pretty well. Besides, these college english classes aren't supposed to be fun, right? After two years of them in high school, it was kind of a given that I wouldn't be writing any MageBoy here. Of course, it got better when, after we turned in our first assignment and the professor used mine as a bad example of scene setting.
See, this was one of the ways that this class told me I didn't suck at writing. After that first assignment? I started kicking ass. Let me have a minute to toot my own horn here. I did really well in this class, to the point where the professor told me I was one of the people he thought was going to bring the class average up. Considering this was my first semester at college and I was in a class with people who were older and more experienced than me, that's pretty damn good. So despite not even being able to write in the genre I was most familiar with, I came in, kicked ass, and had a good time.
The good time came in the form of the structure of the class. There weren't any tests, which is always a plus. It was just you, a few small story assignments, and two 4000 word stories. That's a really relaxed class, and I'll never say no to a class that doesn't take itself overly seriously. The class was kind of lame in the first few weeks (this was a night class that met once a week) since we were just reading short stories and talking about them that way, but after we wrote or first long story, things got amazing.
For the two big stories, the class was set up such that we'd come in, get in a circle, and discuss five or six of the stories for that week. We didn't have to write papers on them or anything. Even if we did, it would have been awesome. What made it so damn cool was that we were discussing other people's stories. The authors weren't dead in the ground somewhere. They were sitting in the room, albeit unable to talk until the end of the discussion of their story. It was so much more real knowing where these people were coming from, especially since they tended to write things based on their own experiences. Furthermore, the discussion about the stories was actually insightful. This wasn't Youtube where someone would chime in with "this so fucking fake and gay you should just kill yourself now because it sucks so bad!" No, you were being monitored and graded here. It was the one time that a college classroom setting was actually conducive to creative productivity.
For me, having something I wrote be talked about for twenty minutes was something of a dream come true in minature for me. They were talking about ME, dammit! My attention whore center of my brain actually got stimulated when I wrote something! I like to lay little traps in my fiction that could be solved through hard thinking, and I remember writing it down whenever someone talked about said trap not being clear. It meant they weren't thinking quite as hard as I would've liked, but I didn't really expect them to since I wouldn't return the favor. It did mean, however, that they were thinking in the directions I wanted them too, and were feeling what I wanted them to feel or debating when I wanted them to debate. Talk is always what lets you know things are going exactly as planned.
Like I mentioned before, you got to know the people pretty well too, partially through their stories and partially through what they said about other people's stories. It was a nice mix of people too. You had the hardcore scifi/tech guy, a football player, a real poetic artsy looking-girl, a cheerleader or two, a slacker, an older woman from the south, some girls that looked like they just didn't care, and a few quieter people. By the end of that class, I knew my classmates better than I would in any class for at least the next year and a half, since I haven't even come close to knowing my other classmates that well. You only ran across a few people that really didn't put together a good story, so not only did you get to write stuff and have it be talked about, you got to read and talk about some good stuff too. The fact that this class came to be entirely centered on its students was awesome to me.
That's how it should be done, isn't it? The students get treated like actual intelligent people and are respected, however briefly, as real authors. This wasn't lectures that lead to a test meant to trip you up and show you how poorly you studied the night before. It wasn't using examples written by people from another time and place to try and get your interest. Nope, a good majority of the class' content was created by the people who were in it at the time. There's an ad out there on the web right now that gloats "I dont take classes, I experience them." I'd believe that if they were talking about this Writing Fiction class.
See, that's what I love. Every other class out there, especially in English, is centered around some person that wrote a bunch of years ago. I mean, how do you feel when I mention Thoreau or Hemingway? Unless you're someone who's into it, it's probably some seriously bad news and makes you lament not bringing a pillow to class. You spend plenty of time reading about other people and their discoveries, accomplishments and creations. Every other class is about things that other people did, and the older the content seems to be, the less interesting it seems to be. This class was so refreshing because it made you learn from things YOU did with YOUR audience, and the things that other people like you did with their audience. It was so...real. And I got two really good stories out of it too...like stories I can tell other people and use to entertain them...if only they were getting graded for it....
Ah, nuts, COME BACK ENGLISH 315!
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