Creative Writing teachers with bias against fantasy/horror

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Veresae
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27 Dec 2008, 4:41 pm

One of the main problems I have with my college is its creative writing department. Of course it would be what I studied; I have been writing my whole life. I wrote children's books in third grade. I wrote my first novel in middle school. I wrote another in high school and I've been working on another for several years. (It's been slow going because I've had to fine tune the uber-complicated plot and balance my writing with my studies.) Please note that I don't have anything published yet because my first two novels weren't that good. They were good for my age, but merely practice in the long run. I do intend to publish my current novel after it is done.

What I primarily write is dark fantasy, action-horror-romance with magic and monsters. It's where my passion lies, where my mind is at: dark, violent, sexual and strange uses of magic in gothic settings, swordfights and bizarre beasts made of black thorns and swollen flesh and mutated meat. The stuff of nightmares, harnessed into romantic stories. Vampires. Succubi and incubi. Demonic zombielike creatures.

The problem is that creative writing professors--at least in my school--loath that sort of writing. In fact, when it comes to fiction, they loath any "speculative fiction," or any "genre fiction," or basically anything that doesn't take place in the real world. This is very strange to me because creative writing in my eyes means writing that expands one's imagination--breaking the boundries of reality. True creativity, in mind, needs an imagination that can do that, that isn't confined in reality's box. Of course, whenever you tell a teacher that you like speculative fiction then they tell you not to box yourself into it.

Creative writing professors at my college seem to believe that just because MOST horror, fantasy, and sci-fi is cookie-cutter garbage that ALL of it is, which simply isn't the case. Most of them have never heard of Neil Gaiman or China Meiville or Alan Moore or Ursela K. Leguin or Philip K. Dick or Isaac Assimov. Most have barely read HP Lovecraft or Stephen King or Clive Barker because they just don't like horror. It's particularly irritating because the most famous alumni to come from my school's writing department is Anne Rice, author of the Vampire Chronicles. No, these are professors who prefer reading often-boring short stories with ambiguous and arguably pretentious endings, like stuff that Flannery O'Connor writes. We almost never read anything that takes place outside of the boundries of the real world in these classes. In one thankfully good class we read Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," but that teacher was one of the few I actually respected. Most of the stories we read in most classes, the "examples of great writing," are exceedingly boring to me. Life is never in danger. There's never any saving the world. Never any action, usually no violence. Never any magic or monsters. If there's sex it's never described in detail. The stories are short so their plots are always simple, and I like my plots complicated. The characters are usually far too typical for me to relate to or find interesting. They're never weird. They're the sorts of short stories that offer me nothing except their use of the craft, which I often disagree with anyway.

Of course, I have to be careful what I say because professors don't always want me explaining what a story could have done better even if it relates to the discussion, even if I use the terms of the craft.

I had a professor tell me, "If you don't like the stories we read, I think you need help."

"What kind of help?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I just think you need help."

I also had one professor in a narrative class GET ON MY CASE for writing fantasy and telling me that she didn't think I would get much out of this class, as if the rules of narrative didn't apply to fantasy. (I emailed the professor expressing my hurt feelings and it all worked out, but it bothers me nonetheless.)

This hasn't been the case with EVERY professor I've had, but it's happened enough times that it's really getting on my nerves.

I do not think it is right for my writing professors to have such a bias against speculative fiction when they have not even read enough of it to judge it.

Has anyone else had bad experiences with this in college?



zghost
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27 Dec 2008, 4:50 pm

Well I didn't go to college, but in high school, yes.
I had some teachers that loved my writing style, and others that hated it. I think I write pretty good, but I do have my own strange style and I can't just turn it off.
All I can suggest is do what you can, and better luck next year.



pakled
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27 Dec 2008, 6:07 pm

I took creative writing in college, and my professor was an African American Studies professor (this was back in the late 70s). After several Sci-fi stories (everyone else was writing poetry....bad poetry...;) that she was bored to tears with, it didn't look like I was going to get a good grade out of it.

Finally, the light bulb came on...what I needed to learn was writing for your audience. Find out what your professor specializes in, and see how you can write to that audience. I wrote a sci-fi story about prejudice (against less-than-beautiful people, about 20 years before Gattaca came out...;), but framed it as prejudice. Because I wrote about an issue she understood and cared about, she couldn't say enough good things about it.

It doesn't mean pandering, or being obsequious. It means realizing that certain people like certain things, and if you want to make a living from it, you need to learn versatility. Nothing wrong in stretching your horizons. Different genres have different things to teach.

Hope this helps



Veresae
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27 Dec 2008, 7:20 pm

I always end up getting out of these classes with an A because I'm too damn good of a student and writer, so grades aren't the problem. I'm not going to write for my professor and I don't have to. The problem, rather, is the lack of respect that my genre of choice gets. It's not right.



Bea
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27 Dec 2008, 7:51 pm

It sounds like you're into deep genre. Do some research on the industry
standards for that genre (there are usually strict rules and formulas
that writers are expected to adhere to to fit their novels into a specific niche
to make it "marketable.") I think there's even a website call "Deep Genre"
where you can get advice.

If you tone down the sex, you might be able to crack the YA market.
YA fantasy has done well recently.

Just remember, when agents and publishers are choosing which books to back,
they are usually thinking in terms of "which shelf in the bookstore will that go on?"
If it doesn't fit on a shelf, they don't want it.



Ancalagon
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27 Dec 2008, 9:10 pm

To an extent, you may just have to let go. It's quite unlikely that a single student is going to change the minds of a large number of like-thinking faculty in the same department, no matter how right you are or how wrong they are. Pick your battles.

I wouldn't recommend writing erotica or graphic horror for school writing assignments. It's not just that it might not be politically correct -- these things can be an acquired taste, like very spicy food. They're used to bland food, so don't make it too spicy, or they'll be thinking of how bad their tongue hurts instead of how good it tastes.

I have to disagree strongly with your suggestion that creativity is best without limits. Often, limits help creativity quite a bit. They narrow your focus, and generate intensity, like a laser does to light.

Whether or not you ever end up writing any actual stories about fancy british people sitting around being fancy and british, trying it could be a useful excercise. If you are writing a story with a boring setting, with boring technology and no magic, you will have to find something else to make it interesting. Witty conversations full of irony and double-meaning, humor, philosophical speculation, and suspense can all be done in a boring English sitting room at tea time just as well as on the deck of a star cruiser or in the 18th level of Hell. The humor can be easier with fancy british people, since they're a bit silly already; funny on the 18th level of Hell would be a bit tougher.


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eristocrat
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27 Dec 2008, 10:57 pm

As a genre writer, you're going to make a lot more money writing than anybody else in the room inlcuding the prof, if that's any consolation.



A350XWB
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27 Dec 2008, 11:06 pm

Creative Writing is an extremely casino subject (if you know what I mean).


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Bea
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28 Dec 2008, 12:03 am

Quote:
Creative Writing is an extremely casino subject (if you know what I mean).


I haven't heard this term before. Could you explain it please?



gbollard
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28 Dec 2008, 1:29 am

To be honest, I never understood why anyone would go to college to learn creative writing... surely that just kills creativity.

These people are doing you a favor. They're showing you the sorts of reactions that critics and many lay-people will give you when you write your stories. You need to learn to toughen up against these sort of people and do what you want.

Honestly... I'll use George Lucas as an example. (even though he's not technically a "writer"). He's got a story to tell and he's going to tell it his way. He got all kinds of rejections in the beginning until his story suddenly (and unexpectedly) got wide acclaim. Then... when he started tinkering and making the prequels, he got hounded by fans who decided that he was doing it wrong.

He's kept on doing what he wanted - not what the fans wanted.

Perhaps he's lost popularity but he's still telling the stories HE wants to tell. We can choose to go along with him or we can find some other "author" to follow.

Be like that.



ignisfatuus
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28 Dec 2008, 2:36 am

Quote:
To be honest, I never understood why anyone would go to college to learn creative writing... surely that just kills creativity.


Truer words were never said. If you want to learn how not to write, read the drivel written by academics.


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MizLiz
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28 Dec 2008, 4:19 am

I had a lot of profs like that (creative writing was my other major). It's why I dropped out. I don't have any genre that I stick to, but I can't stand BS rules.

One prof thought she was doing us a favor by pretending to allow any genre, but she gave us "just one rule" and told us that we couldn't kill anyone in our stories. No one could die. No deaths. None. Her logic was that the death of a character is a cheat. If there's a conflict, an author might try to resolve it by whacking the grandmother so the family can make up at the funeral. So, rather than just punishing amateur writers who would do that (with an F or a talking to or a horsewhipping or whatever it is she would have done), she stifled us. At the start of the class, I had a story ready to go but then I couldn't use it because a central point was the suicide of the main character's sister. It was relevant, not a cheat, but I still had to write something else.

I ended up writing a story I didn't care about and got an A in that class anyway. You'll find that this is what you end up doing. You pander. You have to play their game.

I didn't want to play anymore.

Do you?



0_equals_true
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28 Dec 2008, 9:40 am

Bea wrote:
Quote:
Creative Writing is an extremely casino subject (if you know what I mean).


I haven't heard this term before. Could you explain it please?

gamble



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28 Dec 2008, 9:47 am

MizLiz wrote:
I had a lot of profs like that (creative writing was my other major). It's why I dropped out. I don't have any genre that I stick to, but I can't stand BS rules.

One prof thought she was doing us a favor by pretending to allow any genre, but she gave us "just one rule" and told us that we couldn't kill anyone in our stories. No one could die. No deaths. None. Her logic was that the death of a character is a cheat. If there's a conflict, an author might try to resolve it by whacking the grandmother so the family can make up at the funeral. So, rather than just punishing amateur writers who would do that (with an F or a talking to or a horsewhipping or whatever it is she would have done), she stifled us. At the start of the class, I had a story ready to go but then I couldn't use it because a central point was the suicide of the main character's sister. It was relevant, not a cheat, but I still had to write something else.

I ended up writing a story I didn't care about and got an A in that class anyway. You'll find that this is what you end up doing. You pander. You have to play their game.

I didn't want to play anymore.

Do you?


She gave a rule which meant that you couldn't kill a character?! !! ! A story is boring without a good death in it. :lol: I don't know what I would have done for my creative writing coursework if the teacher had said that. My whole story was based on murder. It even starts with someone being hanged. How dare she call killing a character a cheat! Would she say that William Shakespeare cheated then when he wrote Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet? Those play's were full of death. Creative writing should be a fun course to learn because you should be allowed to write about what you want and not be kept to a strict syllabus like other subjects. If you want to write about a horde of mutant zombies battling the last survivors of mankind then you should be allowed to. I agree that you should at least try to entertain your reader and I think that writing fantasy is a great way to do it. I don't think that you should specifically write for your readers though if you're not enjoying writing what they like. I prefer writing murder mystery stories personally. :twisted:



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28 Dec 2008, 12:35 pm

There are ways of breaking the rules without breaking the rules, if you get creative enough.

The Pit and the Pendulum would be a good example of avoiding the 'no death' rule. Nobody actually dies, even though the theme is death and the whole story is centered around it. You could write about a midieval torture chamber and include quite a bit of graphic violence without actually killing anybody off.

People accused Edgar Allan Poe of never writing a tale with a moral, so he wrote 'Never Bet the Devil Your Head', in which the moral is that you should never bet the devil your head. In it he makes fun of tales with a moral and those who like them.

Horror can be done without blood and guts -- just look at almost anything Alfred Hitchcock did. It can also be done without any element of the supernatural -- Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' are good examples.

Although it's set in a very boring, ordinary suburban neighborhood, Calvin & Hobbes doesn't really have any limit as to how weird it can get, because Calvin is so imaginative.


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MizLiz
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28 Dec 2008, 5:28 pm

It was an intro class (I had it freshman year) so she probably figured that we'd do all kinds of cheating things because we're new at this so of course everyone sucks.

I can't believe I didn't get accused of plagiarism in that class. That wasn't until sophomore year (not a flat-out accusation but more like suspicious looks from a prof too scared of a lawsuit to actually accuse me). I hate it when professors think that just because someone is new to something, then they're not good at it.

And I have to agree with the casino subject sentiment, now that you've explained what it is. Writing classes are a bit of a gamble if you have a prof who will grade you personally. I had one like that before. You can be one of the best writers in the class and they'll still find a reason to drop something to a B or C.

This is why I'm wary about taking classes that can't be graded objectively.