In my writing class, my teacher is constantly telling us how we are all going to get published. "I can't believe I've got a class of so many good writers," he exclaims. I eye him suspiciously every time he says this, because I can't believe that he could really be saying this in earnest. If he's serious, I can no longer trust him. If he would say things like, "I expect that at least one or two of you will have agents in the next five years, and might well get a shitty book deal out of it," I'd have more hope for myself, because at least I could talk myself into believing that I'm one of those few. As it stands though, I feel like I'm competition in the Special Olympics where we're told, sweaty and spastic as we cross the finish line, "You're all winners!"
The writing class is a bizarre place. The writing class goads people into writing if only by giving them material in the form of absolutely ridiculous classmates. Thus far, I've held myself back from blogging about these things, because I'm always too much of a pansy to write about current events in my life for fear of discovery. I have a paranoid suspicion that everyone I know secretly reads my blog, despite 99% of the humans I interact with having no idea that it even exists. This is much like the problem I developed around the age of thirteen, when I was convinced that this boy that I had a crush on could see me all of the time, no matter where I was or what I was doing. This served to make bathtime especially uncomfortable, but got me to stop picking my nose.
In college, one of my classmates in a writing class was so unbelievably uncomfortable-making that words defied me at the time to describe her here. The class was young adult novel writing, and we were all writing very thinly-veiled books about ourselves. Hers, however, was painful in its obviousness, as it was about a girl of mixed race with a learning disorder, same as the author, as she had been proud to explain to the class on her first day. She was one of those people who you could just tell would spend way too much time in the gym locker room naked. Like, fixing her makeup and hair before she had gotten dressed and not bothering to cover herself with a towel because we're all women here, right? But at the same, you could just tell that she was secretly hoping someone would say something to her so that she could be indignant about how badly she was being treated. Her writing was sort of like that too.
The quality of the prose I'm willing to write off to the learning disability, but the content was sort of jaw-dropping in its narcissism. The main character was a younger version of my classmate in all aspects, except better looking. "Ayana was not fat, nor was she thin. She was just right." Ayana's creator, however, was sort of a fatty, but you could tell it was the sort of thing that she fixedly would refuse to admit because she was "just right." This is, let me emphasize, completely different than the I've-got-a-few-extra-pounds-but-go-fuck-yourself attitude that I myself sometimes adopt and which I believe is completely acceptable. This sort of personality type relies on stating the world is one way, a way that they are really good looking and never at fault, when the rest of us can so clearly see that the world is not that way. Then they sit around and wait for one of us to finally say something, to finally get to the point where we just cannot go on listening to how the earth or flat or how the sky is red and to point out how the world really is, so that they can use it as more proof of how horrible people treat them.
The character in her tales, Ayana, suffered persecution at the hands of her un-understanding classmates, a martyr for mixed race children with learning disabilities everywhere. And that's why I really shouldn't be blogging about was absolute drivel this girl was forcing me to read, because it's sort of horrible to be abusing this poor, self-satisfied girl who probably has been given a lot of grief in her life for being different and so obviously proud of that fact. Were her character fat, I think, I could have forgiven a lot more.
My current class has one of the same type in it. He's writing a book about his struggle with bipolar disorder, which if I'm being honest, is exactly the sort of book I like to read. Of course he's managed to take all of the fun out of it, and made what should be an interesting and terrifying life story completely uninteresting. He's a huge, angry looking man, who cutely refers to himself, and all sufferers of the disorder, as "polar bears." Last week he came into class and, having decided that writing a novel was too hard--keep in mind that this is a class entitled "Finishing Your Novel"--that he would write an instructional manual instead, based on a pamphlet that he had picked up at a doctor's office that he kindly provided us with. As the only person in the class capable of either giving or receiving constructive criticism, I questioned the purpose of re-writing a pamphlet but including no new content. The information is already out there, I said, everyone already knows how to find it. What they don't know is your story, and that's probably more interesting for everyone to read. The polar bear nearly blew a gasket and, shaking the binder he had so neatly organized and numbered over the past few weeks, shrieked like a petulant child "But I've worked so hard on this!"
A week later, he came back with a personal essay that he was going to include in his polar bear manual. The personal essay was interesting, in the way that people writing about how shitty their lives are is always interesting, at least, that's what I bank on here, but the overall tone was so irritating that for once, I was actually forced into silence. The point of his essay was that he was a victim of this disorder, and that most everything he did and does should be excused for it. This is exactly the sort of thing that were he writing "fiction" like the rest of us, one of us would finally raise our hands and say "Is it intentional that your character is coming off as a selfish, self-absorbed fucktard? Because, like, if that's intentional, you've done a really great job."
However irritating I find this guy and his subsequent angry comments on my work--he clearly has not forgiven me yet--I can't help but hear that high-pitched screech "But I've worked so hard on this!" as I'm absorbed in my work. I've finished the first draft of my novel and am now in the tedious process of re-writing it, trying to force it into some semblance of order and narrative. There are things in it that I know don't work, but I'd rather try and find a way to write around them rather than just scrap them completely. My re-write has become about just adding more and more, and taking nothing away. I can't cut that paragraph or scene, I've worked too hard on it, my inner polar bear rages. So now I'm trying to learn to let go, both in my book and my life.
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