My Shot
Well, then... I know it's been an incredibly long time since I've posted anything here, and that's my bad. I got caught up in school, my boyfriend, and finding a new job now that I've officially graduated (still super unemployed, by the way). And, I can honestly say that I have not been doing great amounts of writing. Oh, I wrote plenty of academic papers over the last two years, and even some short stories for a Fiction Writing class and for Creative Writers' Club, but I have not done much writing that actually matters to me. That actually makes me feel something.
And that's what I live for. The characters that I can't imagine not being with me in some way. The moments in stories that make me stop and think, "Am I really doing this to this character? I really like this guy; why am I killing off his wife?" Those are the moments I relish. The moments when a story that had no direction suddenly takes off on a journey I never thought it was meant to. The moments when I write myself into a corner and have to find a way to escape whatever stupidity I just created. And best of all, the moments when I just stop typing and start laughing - when I subconsciously started building towards something that makes me grin like an idiot.
I have not written one of these kinds of stories in a while. I did start one that I truly enjoyed back in November 2015. It was meant to be for NaNoWriMo, and I actually did make it to 37,000 words, but didn't finish because of finals taking their toll on my time. And because I liked it so much, I decided that it would be what I shared in my Fiction Writing class during the spring semester.
It was one of those 3 hour long night classes that only met once a week, and there were probably between 20-30 students. Now, I'm the kind of person who truly despises peer editing/peer reading. I have hated it since high school when my teachers first decided, "Hey, you know what, instead of me - the actual professional who knows how to write grammatically correct papers - looking over your papers, why don't we let the idiot next to you who spells his own name wrong look at your paper." I mean, what kind of idiocy is that? As a teacher, you should be the one to look over something a student writes. What the hell can 15-year-old Stan who hasn't read a book in his life actually do to benefit my writing? At all?
He can't. And I swear, I hated peer editing more in college. I can forgive Stan - he didn't know any better. He hadn't learned all that much about grammatical correctness in high school, maybe not until his senior year, so he didn't know how to be helpful. But once you hit college, I expect you to at least know that you should not use a semicolon if A) you don't know which symbol the semicolon is or B) don't know how to actually use it. There are dozens of other mistakes that should be learned by that point, but for whatever reason, are not taught or are not comprehended.
In my first two years of community college, we peer edited everything. The people I traded my papers with would read my work and say, "I don't know what to tell you. I don't see anything wrong." While I could be like, "That's a run-on sentence, that's not where a semicolon goes, and the punctuation goes inside the quotation mark." I went off to university for my last two years of college, and I really thought that the writing I would read there would be better.
Not at all. No, not everyone was terrible. A lot of people I met were incredibly talented writers. But then, others were not. And it really bothers me when people whose writing is just - I'll say not good to be polite - critique me on my own writing. Biggest pet peeve I will ever have. So, that Fiction Writing class, not my favorite.
The story that I had been sharing was about a woman who was a vampire, working at a residence hall in a university in a big city and trying to live a normal life - or as normal as a vampire working around humans could be. Then her former love returns into her life, and she has to deal with that all while a different vampire is killing the residents in her building. That's the basic premise, and they only had to read the first chapter.
People did not hate that the story was about vampires. Some actually really liked that it was about a vampire who wanted to live among humans everyday and not cause any harm. People didn't critique my grammar or my dialogue. Most said my dialogue was the best part of the story. No. It was literally one line that people - really just one guy, we'll call him John - hated. It was a piece of dialogue said by a character who has not had any description whatsoever. Yet, because of the way the line was worded, to John, he considered it racist and not a factual depiction of a person.
I'm sorry, but when did fiction need to be factual? Also, the line was something I had heard myself from working at the front desk of my own university which we both were attending a class at that very moment. So... Besides, I purposely did not give description of this minor character who is not heard from the rest of the story because she didn't need it. She had one line. But, it turned John against my story completely. He said that after that line, which is on page 2 of 8, he didn't read the rest.
Talk about judging a book by its cover. One line, dude. And John was the kind of person who liked to platform. So, it wasn't just him mentioning that he didn't like the line and moving on. It was him attacking my story and me personally for ten minutes. And what did the professor do? Nothing. He sat there as this kid looked at my face and called me a racist who needed to go talk to real people because I was ignorant. What made it even worse? I was not allowed to talk for the entire 45 minutes they spent critiquing my story. I was only allowed to ask one question at the very end, and guess what? We ran out of time, so I never got to ask for anything, or defend myself, or do anything.
By the end, I was just so done with this story, with this class, that I wanted to curl into a ball of nothingness and waste away into the abyss of my blankets back at my dorm room. My boyfriend comforted me, showing me the written critiques that everybody had to write about my story - showing me that most of them were positive, that John's own critique was so horribly written that I shouldn't care what he had to say.
But it did matter to me. If I was going to write and publish books, what was I going to do about people who took one line of a book, and suddenly started attacking me. A line by an inconsequential character who is not even described as being one race or another. She could be anything. She could be a purple alien, for all they know! But being struck like that, berated, humiliated in front of 20-30 people when I had been so confident and proud of the cool new story I was writing... It really hurt.
It was like a thousand papercuts all slicing through my skin right when one started to heal. The story stopped at that 37,000 words. It sits on my laptop untouched. I open it occasionally, thinking I'll edit what I have and then start writing more to it. But that means I have to read that line on page 2. That line that should have meant nothing that suddenly controlled everything about how the story progressed.
It's been way too long. I have that story opened up right now, and I really am excited for the first time since March to read, edit, and write it. It hurts to read that line, and I honestly don't know if it will get gutted when I edit, but I can't stand in the way of me writing something that I love. Something that gave me those moments of laughter and goofy grinning to myself when I'm the only one in the room.
It's time now. It's time for me to buck up and write. I'm going to be consistent here, and I'm consistent working on that story, as well as editing the first novel I ever wrote called The Dimwood Chronicles: Forever Nineteen. I wrote it at 15 in study hall, I gutted it at probably 20, and now I have to gut it again to get it a place where I really like it. Then, I'm going to self-publish it on Amazon. And I'm really excited for that.
I'm not giving up. I'm not stopping. I'm not going to let some platforming guy who doesn't know how to write, tell me how to write. I'm just not. And in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, "I'm not throwing away my shot." And you shouldn't either. I've let the words of someone who doesn't matter to me control me and my writing for too long. Not anymore.
Keep writing, no matter who or what gets in your way. Keep going. I'll be right there with you.
Amy
And that's what I live for. The characters that I can't imagine not being with me in some way. The moments in stories that make me stop and think, "Am I really doing this to this character? I really like this guy; why am I killing off his wife?" Those are the moments I relish. The moments when a story that had no direction suddenly takes off on a journey I never thought it was meant to. The moments when I write myself into a corner and have to find a way to escape whatever stupidity I just created. And best of all, the moments when I just stop typing and start laughing - when I subconsciously started building towards something that makes me grin like an idiot.
I have not written one of these kinds of stories in a while. I did start one that I truly enjoyed back in November 2015. It was meant to be for NaNoWriMo, and I actually did make it to 37,000 words, but didn't finish because of finals taking their toll on my time. And because I liked it so much, I decided that it would be what I shared in my Fiction Writing class during the spring semester.
It was one of those 3 hour long night classes that only met once a week, and there were probably between 20-30 students. Now, I'm the kind of person who truly despises peer editing/peer reading. I have hated it since high school when my teachers first decided, "Hey, you know what, instead of me - the actual professional who knows how to write grammatically correct papers - looking over your papers, why don't we let the idiot next to you who spells his own name wrong look at your paper." I mean, what kind of idiocy is that? As a teacher, you should be the one to look over something a student writes. What the hell can 15-year-old Stan who hasn't read a book in his life actually do to benefit my writing? At all?
He can't. And I swear, I hated peer editing more in college. I can forgive Stan - he didn't know any better. He hadn't learned all that much about grammatical correctness in high school, maybe not until his senior year, so he didn't know how to be helpful. But once you hit college, I expect you to at least know that you should not use a semicolon if A) you don't know which symbol the semicolon is or B) don't know how to actually use it. There are dozens of other mistakes that should be learned by that point, but for whatever reason, are not taught or are not comprehended.
In my first two years of community college, we peer edited everything. The people I traded my papers with would read my work and say, "I don't know what to tell you. I don't see anything wrong." While I could be like, "That's a run-on sentence, that's not where a semicolon goes, and the punctuation goes inside the quotation mark." I went off to university for my last two years of college, and I really thought that the writing I would read there would be better.
Not at all. No, not everyone was terrible. A lot of people I met were incredibly talented writers. But then, others were not. And it really bothers me when people whose writing is just - I'll say not good to be polite - critique me on my own writing. Biggest pet peeve I will ever have. So, that Fiction Writing class, not my favorite.
The story that I had been sharing was about a woman who was a vampire, working at a residence hall in a university in a big city and trying to live a normal life - or as normal as a vampire working around humans could be. Then her former love returns into her life, and she has to deal with that all while a different vampire is killing the residents in her building. That's the basic premise, and they only had to read the first chapter.
People did not hate that the story was about vampires. Some actually really liked that it was about a vampire who wanted to live among humans everyday and not cause any harm. People didn't critique my grammar or my dialogue. Most said my dialogue was the best part of the story. No. It was literally one line that people - really just one guy, we'll call him John - hated. It was a piece of dialogue said by a character who has not had any description whatsoever. Yet, because of the way the line was worded, to John, he considered it racist and not a factual depiction of a person.
I'm sorry, but when did fiction need to be factual? Also, the line was something I had heard myself from working at the front desk of my own university which we both were attending a class at that very moment. So... Besides, I purposely did not give description of this minor character who is not heard from the rest of the story because she didn't need it. She had one line. But, it turned John against my story completely. He said that after that line, which is on page 2 of 8, he didn't read the rest.
Talk about judging a book by its cover. One line, dude. And John was the kind of person who liked to platform. So, it wasn't just him mentioning that he didn't like the line and moving on. It was him attacking my story and me personally for ten minutes. And what did the professor do? Nothing. He sat there as this kid looked at my face and called me a racist who needed to go talk to real people because I was ignorant. What made it even worse? I was not allowed to talk for the entire 45 minutes they spent critiquing my story. I was only allowed to ask one question at the very end, and guess what? We ran out of time, so I never got to ask for anything, or defend myself, or do anything.
By the end, I was just so done with this story, with this class, that I wanted to curl into a ball of nothingness and waste away into the abyss of my blankets back at my dorm room. My boyfriend comforted me, showing me the written critiques that everybody had to write about my story - showing me that most of them were positive, that John's own critique was so horribly written that I shouldn't care what he had to say.
But it did matter to me. If I was going to write and publish books, what was I going to do about people who took one line of a book, and suddenly started attacking me. A line by an inconsequential character who is not even described as being one race or another. She could be anything. She could be a purple alien, for all they know! But being struck like that, berated, humiliated in front of 20-30 people when I had been so confident and proud of the cool new story I was writing... It really hurt.
It was like a thousand papercuts all slicing through my skin right when one started to heal. The story stopped at that 37,000 words. It sits on my laptop untouched. I open it occasionally, thinking I'll edit what I have and then start writing more to it. But that means I have to read that line on page 2. That line that should have meant nothing that suddenly controlled everything about how the story progressed.
It's been way too long. I have that story opened up right now, and I really am excited for the first time since March to read, edit, and write it. It hurts to read that line, and I honestly don't know if it will get gutted when I edit, but I can't stand in the way of me writing something that I love. Something that gave me those moments of laughter and goofy grinning to myself when I'm the only one in the room.
It's time now. It's time for me to buck up and write. I'm going to be consistent here, and I'm consistent working on that story, as well as editing the first novel I ever wrote called The Dimwood Chronicles: Forever Nineteen. I wrote it at 15 in study hall, I gutted it at probably 20, and now I have to gut it again to get it a place where I really like it. Then, I'm going to self-publish it on Amazon. And I'm really excited for that.
I'm not giving up. I'm not stopping. I'm not going to let some platforming guy who doesn't know how to write, tell me how to write. I'm just not. And in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, "I'm not throwing away my shot." And you shouldn't either. I've let the words of someone who doesn't matter to me control me and my writing for too long. Not anymore.
Keep writing, no matter who or what gets in your way. Keep going. I'll be right there with you.
Amy
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