Friday, December 18, 2009

The Classes I Wish I'd Had

I was a creative writing major in college. More precisely an English major with an emphasis in creative writing. Which meant I largely took literature classes with a smattering of poetry and prose classes thrown in for good measure.

How to Get Published 101

Maybe I missed the elective, but the info on getting published would have really been helpful. There are resources, formatting rules, and general advice that a lot of beginning writers just don't know. Knowing about things like agentquery.com or how to properly put together a query letter would have been beyond valuable. It's great to learn a bit about how to write, it's even better to know what to do with it once you've turned out a finished story.

Science Fiction/Fantasy 100-whatever

I know that Literary Fiction is beyond popular. I know that is what most of the big earners write, but it would have been nice to have a class focused specifically on what I was interested in. I am very grateful to the teachers that let me write what I wanted despite their personal tastes, but it was hard going through the classes that insisted I write nothing but Literary. There's just something about the way Literary writers think and genre writers think that seems to be a bit different. It's not bad, but it was hard to keep everything in the day to day and it did do a number on my desire to write for quite a while.

Rhyming Poetry

Everyone wanted me to write prose poetry. It just doesn't work for me. I understand that Frost and Longfellow and Byron were greats that I will probably never ever rival in my lifetime, but that doesn't mean the forms are dead. They don't have to be. Please don't tell me they are. It hurts. So much.

I am deeply grateful for my education. However, if you'd rather not spend years getting a degree that may not pertain the most to writing and more to being a well rounded individual I strongly suggest conferences. They're just more focused.

No comments:

Post a Comment