sweetonmeclarence:

deadgodjess:

thebibliosphere:

morgynleri:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”

What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?

I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.

I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.

Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.

Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.

And God knows Shakespeare loved dick jokes more than he probably loved breathing.

And you know…Shakespeare wrote fantasy, too.

The elitism in creative writing courses is such bull. Don’t get me wrong, I did learn a lot about the craft, but I also learned that “literary fiction” is full of snobs who think their deliberately weird stories about garbage people who function somewhere between “manic pixie dream girl” and “Patrick Bateman wannabe” is the peak of Western lit. We must be cynical about the human condition and approach everything with deep ennui or else it’s not meaningful. It must be tragic and nothing else. Everyone is a cheater or liar or accidental murderer. God, it’s obnoxious.

The one positive was that I did have one prof who was much more open to spec and romance than the rest. He understood that while literary fiction was what was taught in schools “genre fiction” (as if literary fiction isn’t its own genre) still required work, passion, and skill.