A Field Guide to Creative Writing Classes, Part One of a Series

I recently had a wide-ranging conversation with a friend, another writer, over drinks, about the various writer’s groups and creative writing classes we have participated in over the years. This led to the realization that –

A LOT of the same types turn up in creative writing classes year after year after year! Thus, I set about writing character sketches of some of them.

WARNING: This series of articles may offend women, men, minorities, non-minorities, animal-rights people, SF fans, fantasy fans, horror fans, romance fans, poets, sociopaths, sociopathic poets, Moms, Dads, Christians, non-Christians, Narcotics Anonymous people, piscetarians, vegetarians, vegans, and well, pretty much anyone who isn’t me.

So in any writer’s group or creative writing class in which you participate, you may be so lucky as to run into…

The Schlocky Science-Fiction and / or Fantasy Guy!

He’s usually a guy, but once in a while he can be a woman. Instantly recognizable by the extreme pallor of his complexion, the copy of Neuromancer or Deathbird Stories or The Klingon Dictionary in his bag – and he always has the fanciest laptop in class. He’s usually writing some very long (and extremely derivative) high-concept SF novel, invariably with either no female characters in it at all, or populated with laughable fanboy caricatures of the female gender making token appearances as spaceport prostitutes or the Evil Empire’s crown princess. Beware of Schlocky SF Purist Guys, who turn up their noses at fantasy of any kind and only write “hard” SF, because what they write will read like a physics textbook. Especially beware of Schlocky SF Guys who write cyberpunk, or splatterpunk, or cyber-noir, or “slipstream fiction” or who idolize Harlan Ellison, because oftentimes they’re big old know-it-alls who like to sneer at anybody writing in a less serious and elevated genre than themselves. NEVER let them engage the class in a discussion of the potential mechanics of faster-than-light travel, because the wank will never end. You’ve been warned.

Closely related to Schlocky SF Guy is…

The Potentially Sociopathic Horror Fiction Guy!

Ever see Captivity, that awful movie about the pretty young model who is kidnapped, drugged, tied up and subjected to all kinds of horrific tortures including forced cannibalism? It had to be written by one of these guys. Instantly recognizable by his too-direct stares and the aura of creeping dread that suffuses the air around him, this guy idolizes Stephen King and Clive Barker to the point of comedy, but completely discards all that is adventurous, compelling, humanistic, romantic, exotic, mysterious, or affecting about King’s or Barker’s storytelling in favor of a complete focus on blood, gore, carnage, hatred, and sadism. Anything he writes comes off like a first-person shooter game in which sorority girls are the targets instead of zombies, and if you’re a woman and his too-direct stares seem to focus on you for too long, you might seriously consider dropping the class. (No, seriously, kidding aside here – if there’s someone in your class like this, you really should get the hell out of there and take the class next semester. If this guy tries to contact you outside of class, change schools if you have to. I myself once left a writer’s group because I was getting sexual-predator vibes from one of the guys, a man in his forties, and later heard that he’d gotten a 16-year-old girl pregnant. Seung-Hui Cho, who murdered 32 people and wounded 25 more at Virginia Tech, was very much a Scary Horror Fiction Guy; one of his professors, award-winning author and social activist Nikki Giovanni, said that she was so freaked out by his behavior in her classroom and his violent writings that she considered resigning from her job rather than have him in her class anymore. If you come across a Really Scary Guy (or Girl) of any kind in a creative writing class (or in any class, anywhere) listen to your gut, because that fear is there for a reason, and your safety is more important than artistic expression. Okay, end the Public Service Announcement, but you know what I mean.)

It’s even more fun when you get an SF Guy and/or a Scary Horror Guy in the same writing class as…

The Uber-Mom!

Instantly recognizable by the way she pushes baby pictures under your nose right after “Hello” and asks the prof in the first session if it’s okay if she brings her kid to class if she can’t get a sitter. By the act of giving birth, the Uber-Mom has purged all the brain cells capable of dealing with adult concepts from her mind – sloughed ’em all with the placenta. Now the Uber-Mom is pure as the driven snow – she has certainly never lain back groaning in ecstasy as she received an injection of baby-batter into her convulsing womb, no way, no how, her angelic offspring was conceived through immaculate conception – and now she wants the entire world to be as clean and pure as she is. This extends to anything her creative writing classmates write, so she will relentlessly scold and attempt to censor anything produced in the class that depicts war, sex, violence, drama, unresolved sexual tension, social injustice, turmoil, strife, passionate love, troubled emotions, or anything else even remotely interesting. With the Uber-Mom around, you’re writing G-rated children’s books or you get a time-out, little missy. You also cannot critique anything she writes (usually G-rated children’s books with very obvious moral lessons) because to do so makes you a big old anti-family scumbag who should probably be reported to CPS. And heaven forfend if you write a sympathetic gay or childfree character in any of your stories, because ONLY the nuclear family is allowed to exist in her world.

The Uber-Mom is oftentimes in the same class clique as…

The Romance Novelist Wannabe!

Instantly recognizable by the Jude Devereux and Danielle Steele books in her bag. She’s writing a romance novel, naturally, but it never has any of the elements that make high romance really fun: none of the interesting historical background of Diana Gabaldon’s Highlander series, or crazy-erotic sex scenes like Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden, or gorgeous language like Les Liasions Dangereuses or Wuthering Heights, or sympathetic, beautifully drawn characters like anything by Edith Wharton, or sweeping sci-fi space opera with tortured romance in the middle of it like C.S. Friedman’s In Conquest Born – you know, something really good. No, her heroine is always an idealized version of a middle-class suburban marketing assistant or kindergarten teacher (read, herself) winning over a handsome lawyer or doctor who then marries her and fathers her many beautiful children in the suburbs (i.e., achieving her ultimate romantic fantasy.) Even worse is when she’s trying to write something historical, because she invariably fudges the details and includes glaring anachronistic mistakes on every page because historical research is like, SO boring. Even worse than that is when she’s trying to write something featuring a character of another ethnicity than her own, because she never researches the prevalent customs, attitudes, and beliefs of that ethnic group and will commit hilarious cultural bloopers left and right (and God help us if she tries to write ethnic characters’ dialogue in dialect.) Luckily, though, the Romance-Novelist Wannabe is not generally a creature of much stamina, so when your prof confronts her with the reality of how much actual work goes into writing a salable novel, she will usually run out of steam and drop the class midway through.

Though even the Uber-Mom and the Romance-Novelist Wannabe are better than…

TO BE CONTINUED...!!!