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mouseworks at 11:30am on 09/05/2010
mouseworks at 11:30am on 09/05/2010The various issues everyone is bringing up -- poor old lost ideas. I can't imagine anyone who writes s.f. not having to bail on at least one project because other people did it and the market for that particular thing is saturated (women living in cities, men roving the countryside hunting anyone). OMG, move on to another project already.
The other thing is that for the women, the usual ways of being taught now that classical languages aren't tend to come with some gotchas. Male creative writing instructors often don't take women as students as seriously, or take them more seriously if they're beautiful. The women instructors can be useful (Wakowski wasn't a feminist in the modern sense, but her proportion of women students getting attention was high at St. Marks) or they can be eager to prove they're not like those other women.
Right now, it looks to me like the fan fiction writers are being treated like "those other women."
The other thing about academic programs is that publish or perish is built into the bones of them, and combining that with a young writer's need for validation and income for just being able to spend time writing, the pressure generally produces a few who continue and a majority who give up writing completely.
Wakowski's advice was that all this was about the audience: building one, working up from the small press chapbooks, the coterie magazines. The commercial publishers especially can't give a poet an audience. Commercial publishers may be more helpful for genre fiction where the audience is addicted as Joyce Carol Oates points out in her article on H.P. Lovecraft.
(Oates's comments on the difference between "literary" fiction and genre, which don't privilege one over the other, are the best I've ever seen, but Oates has been quite widely published both in and out of genre).
The prevailing drive in this culture is making a living from what you do, and if a person is a writer, making a living from some form of that. For many people, getting published in the right places or making a commercial sale is what validates them, even if they're lost among the bigger names in a small press magazine or if they're one of the 90 plus percent who never sell more than one novel.
But I think that the cultures with less of a dividing line between writers and audiences, where every gentleman facing hanging could write a good death poem, tended to have higher peaks than our more desperately competitive culture where a handful win and the rest, even the ones who probably were kid poets from grade school on, quit.
The other thing is that for the women, the usual ways of being taught now that classical languages aren't tend to come with some gotchas. Male creative writing instructors often don't take women as students as seriously, or take them more seriously if they're beautiful. The women instructors can be useful (Wakowski wasn't a feminist in the modern sense, but her proportion of women students getting attention was high at St. Marks) or they can be eager to prove they're not like those other women.
Right now, it looks to me like the fan fiction writers are being treated like "those other women."
The other thing about academic programs is that publish or perish is built into the bones of them, and combining that with a young writer's need for validation and income for just being able to spend time writing, the pressure generally produces a few who continue and a majority who give up writing completely.
Wakowski's advice was that all this was about the audience: building one, working up from the small press chapbooks, the coterie magazines. The commercial publishers especially can't give a poet an audience. Commercial publishers may be more helpful for genre fiction where the audience is addicted as Joyce Carol Oates points out in her article on H.P. Lovecraft.
(Oates's comments on the difference between "literary" fiction and genre, which don't privilege one over the other, are the best I've ever seen, but Oates has been quite widely published both in and out of genre).
The prevailing drive in this culture is making a living from what you do, and if a person is a writer, making a living from some form of that. For many people, getting published in the right places or making a commercial sale is what validates them, even if they're lost among the bigger names in a small press magazine or if they're one of the 90 plus percent who never sell more than one novel.
But I think that the cultures with less of a dividing line between writers and audiences, where every gentleman facing hanging could write a good death poem, tended to have higher peaks than our more desperately competitive culture where a handful win and the rest, even the ones who probably were kid poets from grade school on, quit.
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