There’s a bar on the lowest level of Pike Place Market where my friends from my college writing classes and I used to hang out on Thursday nights. Another of our classmates tended bar there and she’d sneak us free beers. Thursday nights were quiet, and we felt very sophisticated and writerly.

There was a particular Thursday in November of 2008 – I was just a few months from finishing my degree, and the friends I was with had graduated the previous spring. That night, some other friends of the girl who tended bar showed up, all of them older than we were, and also writerly types. One of them announced “my novel’s going to be published next year!”

My friends and I spent the rest of the night talking with him, because we were excited and curious and a little jealous. He was the first person we’d met to complete the same writing program that we had and get published. “Did you work with an agent?” and “who’s publishing it?” and “what kind of book deal did you get?” we asked.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m going to self-publish it through Amazon.”

Amazon’s self-publishing program was new, and seemed like a totally illegitimate way to get published. But as he explained, he’d been working on this novel for five years: workshopping it, writing proposals, sending it around, getting rejected. He was done and ready to move on to the next thing, but after all that work, he wanted to put it out there for consumption. Self-publishing seemed the perfect fit.

In the years since, the closest I’ve come to getting my writing published is when I hit the “publish” button on blog posts, but I know that the publishing world is changing and Amazon’s Kindle Direct program has had a hand in that. The other big factor is (as Courtenay Hameister explained in a monologue on Live Wire and I transcribed in this post) that publishers are getting more discerning about the authors they work with and favor those who come with a built-in audience.

The title of this post comes from a recent episode of Community.

Last week, Joel and I went to the live recording of Slate’s Audio Book Club, where we met Hugh Howey, author of the book Wool, which I read in November. I intend to write more about the discussion, probably after the podcast has been posted which I expect will be later this week. In the meantime, I’ve been reading some of Howey’s posts about writing and self-publishing and realized I had enough interest in the subject and enough to say that it warrants its own post.

Howey is kind of the poster child for self-publishing – his success story is what everyone who self-publishes hopes for. His self-published novel was so successful that it was picked up for traditional publishing by Simon and Schuster.

In no small part, I’m sure, based on his own success, Howey has become a huge advocate for self-publishing. A quick google search reveals that he’s ruffled a few feathers, particularly among authors who work with traditional publishing houses. Many of the arguments read “but this isn’t the way we’ve always done it!”

Whether people agree or not, self-publishing is becoming reputable and more authors are choosing it over the way it’s “always” been done.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, I like bookstores and I don’t want to see Amazon put them out of business. It’s hyperbolic to say they’re monopolizing the way books are printed and sold, but they now have a hand in publishing, selling, and marketing books and do so in a way that’s convenient for writers and readers alike.

This is from a 2006 article in Wired, which is about search marketing, but uses bookstores v. Amazon to prove its point:

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are.

The article is still relevant after seven years, but especially because from what I can tell, self-published authors having great success are writing in niche genres (think sci-fi, romance, mystery.) Which is not to say that genre books don’t fare well in bookstores, but, well, wouldn’t you read more if rather than having a finite number of books on a shelf, you had nearly limitless options available for digital download?

The Wall Street Journal published an article last month about another genre writer having tremendous success with self-publishing, Russell Blake. The article is now behind a pay wall, but you can read a sizable excerpt on this blog. Blake credits his success to being prolific: according to the article, he wrote 25 books in 30 months.

What he doesn’t credit, but I’m sure is also helping, is the fact that he hires multiple editors and proofreaders to clean up his writing. Similarly, Howey recommends that aspiring authors invest in editing and cover art for their masterpieces. The good news is that authors are fully in control of the presentation (as it is, I understand that the publisher has final say on cover art, title and subtitle, and even trivial things like characters’ names.) The downside is it’s the authors’ responsibility to make sure their work is ready for public consumption.

I think this is a fair price to pay. Amazon makes it easy and convenient to get writing into the hands of readers, and there’s money to be made. Hey, it could even have the added bonus of scaring traditional publishers into focusing on putting out better books, and decrease the number of ghostwritten books with a celebrity’s name on them … but I’m not holding my breath.

Howey says in his advice to aspiring authors “Think about this for a moment: The self-pubbing revolution is in its infancy. The people writing and publishing today have had no time to be discovered. It’s a marathon.”

What I’m getting at is that self-publishing is going to continue to grow, and this is a good thing. In five years, I’ve gone from side-eyeing the writer I met using it to publish his novel, to buying self-published novels on the regular. To publishing my own, maybe?

We’ll see.

I wrote this in August, 2008, as my final paper for a literature class. I found a copy of it recently during the Great Condo Cleaning and really enjoyed reading it, so I thought you might, too.

***

“Who are you?” the little girl asks. I’m sitting in the library frantically trying to finish my paper to turn in before my next class starts, and she sits down next to me and stares. I’ll give her a pass, since she’s just a little kid, but seriously. I’m trying to work here.

“I’m Jennie.” I look up and smile at her, but turn back to my computer. Still, she doesn’t leave, and she’s distracting me, so I ask “um, who are you?”

“You see, I’m not exactly sure,” she says. “When I woke up this morning, I was Alice, but I’m sure I’ve changed many times since then.”

“Oh, Alice! I do know you!” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first. I thought you’d have blonde hair.”

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“I get that a lot.” She touches her hair, the source of my confusion, as it is short and brown and not adorned with a blue headband.

“Anyway, Alice, it’s good to meet you.”

“Very much obliged,” she says, as precociously as the young characters who have since been modeled after her precociousness. “Would you be so kind as to tell me where I am?”

“This is the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington,” I tell her. “We call it ‘U-Dub’ for short.”

“The university, of course. What are we studying?”

“Well, this class is a survey of English literature. But I study creative writing here.”

“But – if you don’t mind my asking …” she trails off.

“Nope, ask away.”

“You are writing this, aren’t you?” she asks.

“Well, that’s another story.”

Alice nods, and is quiet for a moment. I try to get back to my writing.

“Who is that?” she asks. I look up to see whom Alice is asking about, and see Emily sitting a few tables away from us, writing by hand so furiously and intensely that her head almost touches the desk.

“That’s Emily.”

“Who is she?” Alice asks, dissatisfied with my answer.

“Emily Dickinson? Uh, she’s a poet. I’ve met her a few times. She’s a little … weird. Very possibly crazy,” I lower my voice as I say this to Alice, and immediately feel bad for gossiping about her to a little girl.

“Is there a movie about her?”

I laugh. “Nah, I don’t think so. An Emily Dickinson biopic would probably be really boring.”

At this point, Emily hears us talking about her and stands up.

“Whoops, she’s coming over here. I should go …” I start to get up, but Alice stops me.

“I want to meet her. Will you introduce me, please?”

I decide to introduce her, but only because she asked so politely.

“Hey, Emily, I’m Jennie. We’ve met before, I’m not sure if you remember.”

“Jennie,” she says, almost tersely. Actually, I don’t blame her, I’d be terse, too, if I heard me saying to some strange little girl that a movie of my life would be boring.

“This is Alice. Emily, Alice, Alice, Emily.” I gesticulate as I introduce them.

“Very nice to meet you, Emily,” Alice says. I almost expect her to curtsey, and am disappointed when she doesn’t.

“And who are you, Alice?” Emily asks.

“That does seem to be the question today, Emily. I’m not quite sure who I am. Jennie has helped me to establish that I’m Alice, but I don’t feel much like myself. I guess I’m not really sure who I am.”

“She remains unconvinced,” I quip, but neither laughs. Emily gives me a more menacing look than I’ve ever imagined her having.

“This is not a matter to be taken lightly, Jennie,” she tells me. “Alice here doesn’t know who she is. I sympathize with her dilemma, and I’m sure that, your witty repartee aside, you can too.”

“Um, yeah. Definitely I can,” I say, having been thoroughly put in my place. But c’mon, I helped her figure out she’s Alice. I deserve at least a little credit for that. And actually, I’m secretly kind of pissed that Emily butted in and undid that revelation.

“Unless you are sure you know who you are?” Emily asks me.

“I’m Jennie,” I say. I’m tempted to add a snide remark, but considering how the last few have been received, I keep it to myself.

“But who are you?” she asks again.

“I’m Jennie! Isn’t that enough?”

“Is it?” Emily asks.

I don’t answer.

“Alice,” Emily turns back to the little girl, now that she’s shut me up, “who do you think you might be?”

“Well, I’ve ruled out Ada, and also Mabel. I know I’m neither of them.”

“Who are Ada and Mabel?” Emily asks.

“They’re my friends from school,” Alice replies.

“You’re ruling out everyone who you aren’t?!” I say incredulously. “How is that a good strategy? What is you’re someone you don’t know?” I look to Emily to back me up.

“We already know that Alice is someone she doesn’t know, Jennie, because she doesn’t know who she is. I think this is a fine start, Alice. Now, how do you know you aren’t Ada or Mabel?” she asks.

“Because I don’t have ringlets like Ada, and I know I’m better with poetry than Mabel.”

“Oh, now that’s something,” says Emily. “Do you know the one about the bee?”

“Yes!” Alice takes a deep breath, stands up straight, clasps her hands together and begins to recite:

“How doth the busy little bee –”

“No, that’s not the one I meant,” Emily interrupts. “Jennie, do you know the one about the bee?”

“No,” I say, still resentful.

“Well, get your book, then,” she tells me. “Please read for us number 155.”

I read:

The Murmur of a Bee
A Witchcraft – yieldth me –
If any ask me why –
‘Twere easier to die –
Than tell –

The Red upon the Hill
Taketh away my will –
If anybody sneer –
Take care – for God is here –
That’s all.

The Breaking of the Day
Addeth to my Degree –
If any ask me how –
Artist – who drew me so –
Must tell!

“I liked my poem better,” says Alice. “I understand what it meant.”

“I wholeheartedly concur,” I say, holding my hand up for a high five. She looks at me confusedly.

“The poem’s meaning is not our focus today. Did you not hear those last two lines?” Emily asks.

Alice cocks her head, and I have to strangle the “huh?” that I almost let slip. I think I’ve made a big enough idiot of myself for one exchange.

“All right,” Emily says, “Alice, tell me about Lewis Carroll.”

I raise my hand and sit up straight in my chair. I totally know the answer to this.

“Well, that was the name Charles had my story published under.”

“Yes, go on,” Emily says.

I raise my hand even higher and squirm a little bit, just in case she hasn’t noticed me yet.

“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Charles since 1863. I don’t really feel like talking about it,” Alice says.

“That’s perfectly all right. Jennie, what do you know?”

“Lewis Carroll was the penname of Charles Dodgson, a reverend from Oxford, England, who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Alice Liddell and her sisters in 1862. It’s controversial, coz now we know he also made kiddie porn with little girls.”

“Jennie!” Emily scolds me, and then I realize I maybe shouldn’t have said that last part in front of Alice. She’s only seven-and-a-half, after all.

“Sorry,” I whisper.

“Alice, could this maybe be why you don’t know yourself today?” Emily returns to the topic.

“I’m not quite sure what you’re asking,” says Alice. “Could you please explain?”

“Charles Dodgson, your creator, was a reverend with an especial fondness for little girls like yourself. Lewis Carroll was his secret identity who wrote a whimsical fantasy story in which you, Alice, cannot determine who you are. But only temporarily,” Emily explains.

I nod. I think I see where she’s going with this.

“In other words, Alice, your confusion regarding your identity was an extension of Dodgson’s own dual identity. The artist who made you what you are must tell you who to be.”

“But now I’m in Jennie’s story,” Alice very aptly points out.

Emily regards me for a moment. I smile innocently.

“Jennie wouldn’t have a story to write you into if it weren’t for Dodgson. Let’s focus on him,” Emily finally retorts.

“So you think I will know who I am again soon? Maybe, when I wake up tomorrow and the stories are over, I’ll feel like Alice again?”

“I think you already know the answer to that, Alice,” Emily says.

“Emily,” Alice starts, “how do you know who you are?”

“I can’t say that I do,” Emily says, which surprises both Alice and me. “I know that I am Emily Dickinson. I know that I am a poetess. I know who my friends are, and I know where I live, and I know when I was born.

“I don’t know, though, who I am outside of myself. I don’t know who I will be, when I have only my poems to speak for me. I don’t know who I am when I am remembered.”

“What do you suppose is the difference?” Alice asks.

“Alice, I suppose that the difference is that I can answer for myself if I come across a strange caterpillar who asks me who I am. But someone else, Jennie for instance, would answer quite differently if one of her professors were to ask her who Emily Dickinson is.”

“But which do you suppose is right?” asks Alice.

“I don’t suppose the two are very much different, Alice. They are merely different answers to the same question.”

“Well, but that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?!” I say. I’ve gotten a little fed up with Emily’s philosophical musings.

“What point are you talking about, Jennie?” Emily asks, excruciatingly patient.

“Well, I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say, but …” I stand up and pace back and forth in front of the desk we’re all crowded around. “Okay, this isn’t very eloquent, but it’s like, Emily, you’re a poet. We have this giant book –” I lift my copy to show her its size – “of all your poems, and we study them and decide that Emily was this person because her poems are like this. But Alice is the character, and someone else created her.”

“This is ground we’ve already covered today, Jennie,” Emily disdains.

“I know, I’m getting there. So, like, we read the books about Alice and something about the girl Dodgson wrote the books about, and we decide who Alice is. Okay, here’s what I’m trying to say – you’re both down on paper, in black and white. We read the words, and decide who you are, and even if I think you are someone totally different from even what my professor tells me you are, then as long as I can back it up with some of the stuff I read, you can be whoever I think you are. Or whoever I want you to be.”

“What are you saying the difference is, Jennie?” Emily asks.

“Well, I’m a physical person. I’m aging and changing, so whoever I feel like I am today can be entirely the opposite of what I felt like yesterday, but I don’t have something to back it up, coz I don’t have a book of poems with all my thoughts and feelings written down to speak for me if I don’t know who I am.”

“And what are you doing just now, Jennie?” Emily asks, even though I can tell she already knows the answer.

“I’m writing it down,” I reply.

We’re all quiet for a moment.

“But am I not a physical person? What am I?” Alice says, obviously distressed by the new revelation.

“You used to be a physical person, but you died. Now you’re in a book. You’re characters and ideas and concepts. It’s up to me to read them and decide what I want to take from the poems, or the story,” I say.

I wait for Emily to argue with me, but suddenly, they’re gone. And somehow, as if by magic, my paper is finished. I hurry to class to turn it in.

So, uh, I meant for Monday’s post on the difference between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time to be more interesting, but I got distracted while writing it … so I wrote this epically long post to make up for my last post’s lameness.

Here we are. 6 days into November and I’m thisclose to calling it quits on my NaNoWriMo novel. Just like every year.

I’m thinking that maybe it’s time I come to terms with the fact that I may never write a novel. Maybe blogging is good enough for me.

I considered doing NaPoBloMo (National Post Blogging Month) this year – another writing challenge, this one writing a blog post every day for the month of November. Obviously, I decided against it.

Why? Well, my blog is presently my most well known and widely read work. Not to say it’s that well known or widely read, or even that it’s my best writing – most of my best writings are sitting in a drawer in my desk and have only been read by me, and one or two of my college professors many years ago. Not very logical, I know.

But I’m pretty happy with the writing I’ve published here recently. I’ve devoted good chunks of time to my best posts. The problem with trying to post daily is I feel pressure to write something … anything! and then I get antsy about it and worry that my life isn’t interesting enough for blogging so then I try to string together some words about what I did during the day, like “I watched some TV tonight, and it was funny. I like TV.”

From a recent episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

I do like TV, it’s true. But those are not particularly good sentences (and we already know that good writing comes from good sentences.)

***

Last month, Geraldine of the Everywhereist posted her 1000th blog post, which was a litany of things she’s learned along the way.

I’ve been thinking about #70 pretty much since I read the post: “Laugh at the fact that you’ve said, time and again, that you could never write a book. But here you’ve written a novel’s worth of posts, day by day.”

In order to “win” (complete, really) NaNoWriMo, writers must write 50,000 words. 50,000 is the magic number (although several “experts” on Amazon’s Askville say the average novel is twice that.)

I counted up the words I’ve written in my posts (okay, not really – I added up the word counts that WordPress is kind enough to calculate for me) and my word count is just shy of 59,000 in the posts on this blog. That doesn’t take into account the words I’ve written on pages (like my “about” page) or the 100 or so posts that I did not move over from the gf-gf. So I’m well over 50,000 words into blogging.

Woo-hoo, go me, I could’ve totally written a novel by now!! Right?

***

Okay, so this is going to seem like a huge tangent, but it’s actually what inspired this post: I have a new favorite podcast. It’s called Live Wire! Radio. It’s recorded live in Portland and hosted by Luke Burbank, who also hosts my other favorite podcast. On episode 229 (which is a few weeks old at this point) Luke interviews Courtenay Hameister, the former host who left the show to finish her book.

You should definitely listen to the full episode, especially if you want to hear a musical interpretation of a Chinese giant salamander, but the interview with Courtenay Hameister is my favorite part. Even though this part of her spiel broke my heart:

The publishing world has pared down and they no longer have the budget to send every writer on an expensive book tour to garner new audiences. In fact, in an attempt to guarantee that a publisher isn’t going to be stuck with any unsold inventory, writers are now expected to come to them with a built-in audience. It’s what they call a ‘platform.’
Are you a blogger with hundreds of subscribers?
Do you have tens of thousands of Twitter followers?
Do you have a Klout score of over 70?
Do you even know what a Klout score is?
This is what they would have asked Dorothy Parker. And Dorothy would have been amazing on Twitter. 70 years before Twitter existed, she spouted 140-characters-or-less jewels, like ‘it serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard’ and when she was asked to use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence, she said ‘you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think!’
Best. Tweet. Ever.
Can you imagine reading Jack Kerouac’s drunken Facebook posts from The Road?
Or Jane Austen’s blog, ‘Austen-tatious’?
Sure, it would have been interesting, but none of these people would have wanted to have a platform, because what they wanted to do was write. And not write tweets or tumblr posts with blurry Instagrams of their mutton and mead, but books and poems. Not to write about their writing, but just to write.
It pains me to think that writers are pulling from their creative wells to fill their twitter streams instead of pages. If you think about it that way, these platforms are robbing us all of words that otherwise would have been great works of art, but then, I suppose, it depends on whether or not you think a well constructed tweet is a great work of art.

No, Courtenay Hameister, please don’t ruin Twitter for me! I only just got it! I’m so funny on Twitter!

I say hearing her talk broke my heart, because it hadn’t ever occurred to me that maybe blogging is misappropriating my creative faculties, or in some way preventing me writing my Great American Novel.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

Because on the one hand, here I am, writing away on my blog and ignoring the novel idea that I was so excited about just last week. On the other, I can guarantee you that in the two years between when I finished my creative writing degree and when I started blogging on the gf-gf, I wrote almost nothing.

Blogging is helping to make me a better writer because every week, I sit down at my computer to write and edit and revise and read aloud to make sure my sentences make sense. (I know I still post some things that are nonsense. Occasionally that’s intentional.) I try to stick to a semi-regular posting schedule, which means I have to write at least semi-regularly. I have word documents bursting with lists of ideas and half written drafts.

Doing a once-yearly writing challenge doesn’t get my creative juices flowing as consistently as blogging does. But we cannot forget that writing is not just about creativity. It takes discipline to actually sit down and turn ideas into good sentences. That’s something the good writers have, or have cultivated, and that’s what blogging has done to make me a better writer.

BTW, I know I’m not a great blogger, and I’m not too worried about it. Great bloggers have hundreds of subscribers and tens of thousands of Twitter followers and Klout scores above 70. But me, I’m too shy to even share links to my posts on Facebook.

It drives me crazy that some of the good bloggers are actually pretty terrible writers. They are obviously not people who take the time to sit down and write and edit and revise and read aloud to make sure sentences make sense. I find this very disheartening, but it’s just proof that blogging and writing are actually quite different skills. Maybe the publishing world is unaware of that, or maybe they really are so desperate to sell books that they don’t care whether or not writers are crafting good sentences.

(My view of this is a little pretentious, I know.)

I’m going to continue blogging here for a while, whether I’m good at it or not. Because it’s fun and it keeps me writing. I like that my blog is constantly changing and evolving in two directions – in that I’m semi-regularly adding new posts, but also going backwards to edit old posts and tinker with my writing. Think of me as the blogger equivalent of George Lucas tinkering with the Star Wars movies. Except that no one really notices when I change things. And, you know, Disney isn’t going to buy my company … but whatever.

There’s an argument for leaving old posts untouched, so the original content stays intact – I’ve seen readers on certain forums get upset when bloggers go back and revise their old posts. Much of the time, those bloggers are revising stuff that makes them look like assholes – but hey, I’ve done that too. Usually, I revise to fix typos and improve my sentences – which I don’t think is a waste of my time, considering that this is my most well known and widely read work. My audience is still tiny enough that no one notices or cares about my constant revising.

Also, as Paul Valery said and a million students of creative writing have quoted: “a poem is never completed, only abandoned.” Same goes for blog posts.

So now comes the time when I abandon this post. Maybe I’ll go work on my novel. I can start by rewriting a few of my sentences.

I usually think it’s the most boring thing in the world when bloggers go all meta and start talking about blogging. I am stooping so low as to talk about it today, but I’ll try to keep it interesting.

But I have to start with a little background and this is definitely the boring part: I’ve used WordPress to blog since I started the gf-gf in 2011; before that I’d used Live Journal and Xanga and Blogger and I had a blog on my MySpace page. I never used any of them as long as I’ve used WordPress, but I never wanted to use those platforms for too long. The more I use WordPress, the more it impresses me.

In the last couple of weeks, I decided to update my layout (perhaps you noticed that it was constantly being rearranged – sorry about that. I think I’m done now.) In the past, I’ve used pre-made themes that someone else created- but if I wanted to customize it, I had to tweak the code. WordPress is popular enough now that someone’s created a framework, so I can just pick some colors and check some buttons and make my site look just like I want in a matter of hours and not have to know any code.

So the reason I’m breaking my silence on the subject of blogging isn’t just because I want you to click through from your email or feed reader to see my completely custom layout – it’s also because of the injustice I feel that I’m finally writing a blog I love and looks good at a time when blogs are dying.

In April of 2012, XKCD published this web comic, and — as predicted — this time last year, “Tumblr” became a more popular search term than “blog.” I didn’t do any google searches as to whether or not more people are keeping tumblelogs than blogs. But let’s go ahead and say that’s probably the case.

And before you go telling me that people use Tumblr to keep blogs, I’ll just tell you not to bother. I knew that already, duh!

The difference, to me, is long form v. short form content – something I’ve been thinking about since I attended MozCon this summer (mostly because I didn’t really understand the difference until then, honestly.)

In the last year, WordPress has released several updates to keep relevant in a world where Tumblrs are (or are likely becoming) more popular than blogs. One such update was adding different post formats, so people who want to keep tumblelogs can do so with WordPress. Now, when I compose new posts, I have all these options:

I’m intrigued by this and may try it in future posts, but I’m aware that I get a little wordy when I write — as long as I am posting a quote by someone famous, I will surely have commentary. As long as I am posting just a pretty picture, I will surely have commentary.

Blogging is a good fit for me.

But there’s a but – I’m still enamored of Twitter, and tweet pretty often these days. I think of tweets (or status updates and the like) as microblogging – just that quick “what I’m doing now” snippet. But posts that short are generally best kept on Twitter, if you ask me.

Perfect example – I uploaded this screencap sometime in August intending to write a post about summer movies. But then I realized I’d already said everything I wanted to say about Pacific Rim in this tweet. A longer post was unnecessary.

Not saying there’s anything wrong with microblogging or tumblelogging. It just makes me sad to see that short, even wordless posts are winning over the long blog posts of yore (i.e. 10 years ago.) Are people not interested in reading, or is it writing that’s becoming a thing of the past?

Okay, I’ve got that off my chest. Sorry if I got a little long winded – just doing what I can to keep blogging alive.

***I wrote this in December 2008 after completing the last of the literature class requirements for my college degree. It was originally published on my myspace blog, and I found a copy of it recently and thought it was a fun piece of writing, so I wanted to share again.***

I’ve always loved to read. Admittedly, a number of materials that I enjoy(ed) reading throughout my lifetime have not always been the most scholarly of pursuits (see this, this, and these), but I have always found enjoyment in the act of reading.

source

So once I got to college, I decided to major in English. Seemed like a pretty logical choice. But majoring in English for the most part, beat that love of reading out of me.

At the UW, there is a track for creative writing, which, thankfully, I am on. I’m was a bit bewildered this summer when a fellow English student asked what the difference was, and I never did come up with a polite way of saying “I’ll be writing all the shit that you’ll be writing about.” But one way that I think pretty accurately describes the difference is that writing classes are concerned with the methodologies of a text, and literature classes are concerned with the ideologies. Or, one is super-fun and the other (often) unbearable.

The creative writing classes are taught as a kind of a series, wherein (basically) one must take a poetry and prose writing class at the 200, 300, and 400 levels. These classes have been phenomenal. We’ve read and discussed compelling pieces, and the classes built on one another seamlessly. But then there are the literature classes.

Now, there have been three literature classes that I took in the time of my college career that were not only bearable, but that I loved and actually learned something from: one called “The Comic Book as Literature,” one called “The Culture of You,” and the last called “’Twas Here My Summer Paused.” The common denominators in these three classes was that they all incorporated contemporary literature, writings were concentrated around my personal experience of the texts, and the workloads were all reasonable.

The problem is, in the English major, I am required to take (and pass, obviously) three courses focusing on pre-1900 literature. Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. No, that’s not the problem, the problem is that in these classes I was expected to plough through a book every week, paying attention to the most insignificant details, try to find the underlying messages that may not even actually be there, and then regurgitate a few hours of lecture into a 4-6 page paper. And often, I was juggling two of these classes at once. This is not to say that I misunderestimate the power of reading in my study of writing. I just think that the balance of these classes is way, way off.

So by now, you either A). think I’m crazy for titling this blog after Isaac Asimov, B). haven’t the foggiest why I did so, or C). totally forgot about that. Here’s a little anecdote:
Isaac Asimov was auditing a literature class at a local college in which they happened to be studying one of his books. The professor was lecturing on the themes conveyed and what the author’s intent was, when Asimov stood up and said “excuse me, but, I’m Isaac Asimov, and when I wrote this book I wasn’t thinking about any of this. I was just trying to write a book.”

What ever possessed any professor to pick apart Asimov’s book like that? Who was he to try and comment on authorial intentions? And why can’t someone just read it and say, “hey, I liked this book. Here’s why …” When did that stop being enough? I could easily write a paper about why a book I read for a class, say, I don’t know, Uncle Tom’s Cabin left me totally cold, like I couldn’t keep the characters straight and the book was too long and drawn out. But picking apart the minutia of Africanisms in the text was dreadful and tedious. Too many English classes have left me feeling dreadful and made me associate reading with tedium.

The real travesty in all this (besides my lost love of reading) is that with the impending educational budget cuts, the English classes that will make the cut are the Shakespeares and the Dickenses. Even though any sane college kid would a thousand times rather take “The Comic Book as Literature,” and (in my opinion) that class would do more to stretch his or her thinking about the definition of literature and implications of language.

The good news in all of this nonsense is that, as of Monday, my last literature paper is turned in and I will take no more!