A Field Guide to Creative Writing Classes (Part Two of a Series)

Continued from Part One...

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 Ball-Crusher!

(I was going to say the Ball-Buster, but that wasn’t violent enough.) Instantly recognizable by the Andrea Dworkin books in her bag and the way she sneers whenever someone with a penis offers an opinion. Usually a recent divorcee, the Ball-Crusher HATES men. All her stories are about humbling, punishing, and otherwise destroying literary avatars of the man that done her wrong, and she won’t be satisfied with merely destroying that guy on paper, either – she will glare at any male student who offers suggestions as though she were picturing his ’nads in a carpenter’s vice. (If you’re a man in a class with a Ball-Crusher, you will feel a creeping sensation the moment she looks at you – that’s your testicles trying to crawl back up into your abdominal cavity for protection.) If you’ve got a male professor teaching the class, she will officiously correct him and dismiss all of his commentary out of hand. God help you if you’re in a class with a Ball-Crusher AND a Scary Horror Fiction Guy, because the sparks will fly like a forest fire.

Closely related to the Ball-Crusher is…

The Angry Politically Correct Person!

This person (usually a woman, though occasionally she can be male) is a member of X ethnic or ethnoreligious group, unless she’s a vegan / vegetarian / piscetarian / animal rights activist / member of PETA. Unless she’s physically challenged somehow, or into fat acceptance, or pro-anorexia. Unless she’s way too into pro-life or pro-choice. Unless she’s a Wiccan. But it doesn’t really matter what her social platform is – this chick has Issues, and there’s nothing she likes more than having the captive audience of a creative writing class who have to listen to her pontificate to get class credit. She invariably despises white people / Catholics / atheists / omnivores / people who wear leather or fur / anybody of a different body type (or who isn’t a Hmong left-handed Dianic Wiccan dwarf like herself) and all of her stories are about social injustices done to her -- excuse me, her beleaguered protagonist -- by the enemy. But matter how melodramatic her plots and paper-thin her characters, however, nobody in the class will ever point out that she’s making Eddie Murphy’s “prison poet Tyrone Green” character look subtle. To her, anyone different than herself is The Oppressor, even the guy in veggie-leather Birkenstocks who just got here last quarter from Finland. Critiquing her work is an agony, because you know that any criticism that someone not of her demographic makes of her writing is the literary equivalent of outing yourself as insensitive / misogynist / misandrist / racist / reverse racist / sizeist / classist / baby-hater / decadent consumerist / Luddite / clubber of baby seals. If your professor isn’t a member of her demographic, she’ll dismiss everything he or she says out of hand, and if your professor is of the same demographic as she is, she’ll monopolize his / her attention like she was the only student in the class. The best way to deal with this writer is not to engage her – when the prof throws the floor open for comments on her work, keep quiet, hunch down in your seat and try not to draw any attention to yourself. Unfortunately everybody else in the class has had this same idea, so the professor will then reluctantly call on somebody randomly chosen off the class roster to comment. If this is you, you might consider faking a seizure.

Just as fun to work with is…

The Born-again Christian!

Instantly identifiable by the way they preface everything they write with Bible verses, and talk about God or Jesus in every sentence they write, the Born-Again Christian writer is Bringing You a Message, and if you’re not especially interested in said Message (oftentimes conveyed through the character of wise, sagacious big cats) you’re probably under the influence of… maybe… SATAN!?! Everything the Born-Again Christian writer produces is some kind of not-real-subtle Christian allegory (unless it’s a cautionary tale about a girl who had an abortion and had a nervous breakdown afterwards), and any critique you make of the Born-Again Christian’s work is the literary equivalent of nailing Christ to the cross, because their great faith in the Lord infallibly turns them into literary geniuses (at least in their own completely unshakable estimation.) If you think otherwise, you’re SO going to hell.

However, none of the above can match the total narcissism of…

TO BE CONTINUED...