RE: Writing Books
March 23, 2014 at 1:10 am
(This post was last modified: March 23, 2014 at 1:11 am by My imaginary friend is GOD.)
Sorry for the long post in advance, but read all of it anyway.
It's like this. People think that "writing" is just putting your thoughts on paper, or these days, in text, more like, and that what they think is IMPORTANT and TRUE and UNIVERSAL. Absolutely EVERYONE thinks this. On the latter part, it just so happens that only some people are correct, in the eyes of the masses. I guess in their own eyes, they're totally correct.
They do not realize that there exists this whole world full of people who are serious about writing and think IT IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING GAME. They do not realize that being a GOOD writer is not just automatic. It takes work and skill and talent. They do not know that writing is a craft, and an art, and a goddamn harsh mistress. They have not poured years into it.
If it I start to sound bitter, it's because I have been writing creatively literally since I learned how to write the letters of the alphabet. The only other thing I learned in school that had an impact on my writing was I learned the rules of spelling and grammar. That shit was important to me and I never forgot a damn word that was spoken to me of it. That helped my writing to be coherent and at least credible enough that people would be willing to read it. Everything else, I learned either intuitively, through my own research, or directly from successful authors (although to be fair, I had access to some of those authors due to my school placing a huge importance on reading and writing). In second grade, they wanted to test me for "giftedness," and determined that I was "gifted" in Creative Writing. Basically, this meant I wrote something that actually interested them, from a totally boring routine writing prompt. I can't think of how to explain what I did without the details, so here they are. The prompt was something like, "describe your dream house" and I proceeded to use up all the provided space to describe something like a futuristic underwater castle under a dome on some planet in deep space. I can't remember exactly what it was. But it was something like that. That was how I did ALL my writing assignments, you see. If I found them boring, I fucking MADE them interesting. And I included sarcasm because the teachers loved the shit out of it.
So, you see, as a child, I had potential. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to be GOOD. I didn't know or care if I was going to make this a career, but I wanted to be good for the sake of being good at something. When my 6th grade year went horribly, I considered applying to a (technically public, but you needed to be accepted to get in) local arts school. I even went as far as shadowing a student that went there and was taking their writing program. I even took their summer class for writing, and I learned a lot of things about writing I did not know, but I also learned that I was not GOOD enough for that school. Maybe I would get in, but I would definitely feel inferior to everyone else there. So I decided not to apply there.
I continued to write in my off time mostly because it was therapeutic and I enjoyed it, but apparently, totally without my noticing it, I was changing and getting better all the time. Then when I was much older, sometime around high school age, my mother payed for me to attend a summer writing camp which was run by a local college for my students of high school age. I think I was the youngest one there, but that was not the awkward part. What my mother did not know was that this writing camp was designed for young promising black students who showed promise in their writing. I was the only white kid there. At least there was also one hispanic kid. For some reason we did not have any interest in trying at all to be close friends there. I found other kids in the group that I felt got me because they were more mature or geeky than the others. But a lot of the field trips were designed to inspire the class as writers because of their black identity. As you know, I am all about social justice for everyone and I'm really passionate about race issues, especially because it is so important here in Alabama and central to absolutely everything here, so it turned out I fit in perfectly. I hope none of them secretly thought I was trying to be politically correct and do what I thought they wanted me to do in those situations, because I was totally, completely, unapologetically genuine. I think they got that. But of course, I can't be certain.
Anyway, what I learned from taking this class was that I could write any kind of thing on command from any prompt and it would be GOOD. People would be moved by it. They would really connect with it. So, I entered college as an English major with a concentration in creative writing. Then I found out their "creative writing program" didn't actually involve much creative writing. So I was like, "Well, I guess I won't be choosing a career in writing, then. Good, because I don't want to die drunk and penniless as a bum on the street anyway."
I'll just tell you the rest of this story, because it's good. That semester, I took ANTH 101, which happened to be an introduction to cultural anthropology. It was kismet. I swear I had no idea that anthropology was even a thing. The only anthropologist I had ever heard of was Jane Goodall, and I had only heard her described as a primatologist, which I thought was just, like, a really specific branch of biology. I was like, "You're telling me that I can just study humans and culture and someone will PAY me for it? Do you realize that culture is literally everything? So basically, I can get paid to study whatever the FUCK I want, I can get MONEY for it? And I could study several totally completely different things over my lifetime and it would all be called anthropology and it would be an actual job? And it is somehow an art and a science AT THE SAME TIME?" Mind. Blown. I don't know if I've ever been so excited about the possibilities before me at any other point in my life, and I'm a very excitable person. I immediately changed my major to Anthropology. And I know now, if I were hired to actually do anthropology, I would be so, so happy, and so fulfilled. There are lots of jobs, actually, that could make me really, really happy. I'm so glad that I discovered this could be one such thing.
Now that you know all that, imagine if I had taken an introductory philosophy class instead. As many options as anthropology gives you, philosophy is literally just asking questions about ANYTHING. Even asking questions about questions is philosophy. It is the thing that all intellectual study and discussion has stemmed from in the course of human history. AND YOU CAN BE PAID TO DO IT. I want to be a philosopher as a career, however, because in order to actually get paid to do philosophy, you pretty much have to be in academia. In anthropology, by contrast, you can do anthropology for any kind of employer that will hire you to do it, which includes academia, the government, museums, even marketing companies. However, I will not work for a marketing company unless I really have to, because that would be using the powers of anthropology for evil.
It's like this. People think that "writing" is just putting your thoughts on paper, or these days, in text, more like, and that what they think is IMPORTANT and TRUE and UNIVERSAL. Absolutely EVERYONE thinks this. On the latter part, it just so happens that only some people are correct, in the eyes of the masses. I guess in their own eyes, they're totally correct.
They do not realize that there exists this whole world full of people who are serious about writing and think IT IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING GAME. They do not realize that being a GOOD writer is not just automatic. It takes work and skill and talent. They do not know that writing is a craft, and an art, and a goddamn harsh mistress. They have not poured years into it.
If it I start to sound bitter, it's because I have been writing creatively literally since I learned how to write the letters of the alphabet. The only other thing I learned in school that had an impact on my writing was I learned the rules of spelling and grammar. That shit was important to me and I never forgot a damn word that was spoken to me of it. That helped my writing to be coherent and at least credible enough that people would be willing to read it. Everything else, I learned either intuitively, through my own research, or directly from successful authors (although to be fair, I had access to some of those authors due to my school placing a huge importance on reading and writing). In second grade, they wanted to test me for "giftedness," and determined that I was "gifted" in Creative Writing. Basically, this meant I wrote something that actually interested them, from a totally boring routine writing prompt. I can't think of how to explain what I did without the details, so here they are. The prompt was something like, "describe your dream house" and I proceeded to use up all the provided space to describe something like a futuristic underwater castle under a dome on some planet in deep space. I can't remember exactly what it was. But it was something like that. That was how I did ALL my writing assignments, you see. If I found them boring, I fucking MADE them interesting. And I included sarcasm because the teachers loved the shit out of it.
So, you see, as a child, I had potential. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to be GOOD. I didn't know or care if I was going to make this a career, but I wanted to be good for the sake of being good at something. When my 6th grade year went horribly, I considered applying to a (technically public, but you needed to be accepted to get in) local arts school. I even went as far as shadowing a student that went there and was taking their writing program. I even took their summer class for writing, and I learned a lot of things about writing I did not know, but I also learned that I was not GOOD enough for that school. Maybe I would get in, but I would definitely feel inferior to everyone else there. So I decided not to apply there.
I continued to write in my off time mostly because it was therapeutic and I enjoyed it, but apparently, totally without my noticing it, I was changing and getting better all the time. Then when I was much older, sometime around high school age, my mother payed for me to attend a summer writing camp which was run by a local college for my students of high school age. I think I was the youngest one there, but that was not the awkward part. What my mother did not know was that this writing camp was designed for young promising black students who showed promise in their writing. I was the only white kid there. At least there was also one hispanic kid. For some reason we did not have any interest in trying at all to be close friends there. I found other kids in the group that I felt got me because they were more mature or geeky than the others. But a lot of the field trips were designed to inspire the class as writers because of their black identity. As you know, I am all about social justice for everyone and I'm really passionate about race issues, especially because it is so important here in Alabama and central to absolutely everything here, so it turned out I fit in perfectly. I hope none of them secretly thought I was trying to be politically correct and do what I thought they wanted me to do in those situations, because I was totally, completely, unapologetically genuine. I think they got that. But of course, I can't be certain.
Anyway, what I learned from taking this class was that I could write any kind of thing on command from any prompt and it would be GOOD. People would be moved by it. They would really connect with it. So, I entered college as an English major with a concentration in creative writing. Then I found out their "creative writing program" didn't actually involve much creative writing. So I was like, "Well, I guess I won't be choosing a career in writing, then. Good, because I don't want to die drunk and penniless as a bum on the street anyway."
I'll just tell you the rest of this story, because it's good. That semester, I took ANTH 101, which happened to be an introduction to cultural anthropology. It was kismet. I swear I had no idea that anthropology was even a thing. The only anthropologist I had ever heard of was Jane Goodall, and I had only heard her described as a primatologist, which I thought was just, like, a really specific branch of biology. I was like, "You're telling me that I can just study humans and culture and someone will PAY me for it? Do you realize that culture is literally everything? So basically, I can get paid to study whatever the FUCK I want, I can get MONEY for it? And I could study several totally completely different things over my lifetime and it would all be called anthropology and it would be an actual job? And it is somehow an art and a science AT THE SAME TIME?" Mind. Blown. I don't know if I've ever been so excited about the possibilities before me at any other point in my life, and I'm a very excitable person. I immediately changed my major to Anthropology. And I know now, if I were hired to actually do anthropology, I would be so, so happy, and so fulfilled. There are lots of jobs, actually, that could make me really, really happy. I'm so glad that I discovered this could be one such thing.
Now that you know all that, imagine if I had taken an introductory philosophy class instead. As many options as anthropology gives you, philosophy is literally just asking questions about ANYTHING. Even asking questions about questions is philosophy. It is the thing that all intellectual study and discussion has stemmed from in the course of human history. AND YOU CAN BE PAID TO DO IT. I want to be a philosopher as a career, however, because in order to actually get paid to do philosophy, you pretty much have to be in academia. In anthropology, by contrast, you can do anthropology for any kind of employer that will hire you to do it, which includes academia, the government, museums, even marketing companies. However, I will not work for a marketing company unless I really have to, because that would be using the powers of anthropology for evil.
