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Play It By Ear
Jun. 25th, 2015 10:01 pmBAHAHA. A bunch of authors in the UK say the schools' creative writing curriculum is damaging creative writing.
I got that same ridiculous lineup of rules like "USE MORE SIMILES AND METAPHORS!" and "USE BIG FANCY ADJECTIVES!" and "NO TWO SENTENCES SHOULD BEGIN WITH THE SAME WORD!", but fortunately for me (I don't know about my fellow students), I also actually read books, and I could tell that the rules the teachers gave us were total bullshit.* The way I developed an ear for style--and a grasp of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a sense of proper punctuation, was to:
1. READ A LOT
2. WRITE A LOT
I even started thinking of the dopey rules they gave us in school as "stunt writing," because you were clearly trying to be flashy about it. So I'd do the completely artificial school writing, then go home and work on things like the grand unified modern fantasy featuring hobbits, Atlantis, washed-up rock bands, physicist con artists, Santa Claus, and twin wizard kids, or my extremely detailed Super Mario fanfiction. God DAMN those were good times. And I think those and other stories both taught me more about how to write than anything else I did in school.
Here's hoping that kind of curriculum falls by the wayside. Maybe we'll get some better writers out of it.
*I have a LOT of rants in my old notebooks about the No Two Sentences rule. I found that one to be idiotic. The proto-linguist in me did quite a job analyzing the role of the articles a and the, but the reader/writer in me just wanted to point out that similarly-constructed sentences could be an extremely effective stylistic tool.
I got that same ridiculous lineup of rules like "USE MORE SIMILES AND METAPHORS!" and "USE BIG FANCY ADJECTIVES!" and "NO TWO SENTENCES SHOULD BEGIN WITH THE SAME WORD!", but fortunately for me (I don't know about my fellow students), I also actually read books, and I could tell that the rules the teachers gave us were total bullshit.* The way I developed an ear for style--and a grasp of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a sense of proper punctuation, was to:
1. READ A LOT
2. WRITE A LOT
I even started thinking of the dopey rules they gave us in school as "stunt writing," because you were clearly trying to be flashy about it. So I'd do the completely artificial school writing, then go home and work on things like the grand unified modern fantasy featuring hobbits, Atlantis, washed-up rock bands, physicist con artists, Santa Claus, and twin wizard kids, or my extremely detailed Super Mario fanfiction. God DAMN those were good times. And I think those and other stories both taught me more about how to write than anything else I did in school.
Here's hoping that kind of curriculum falls by the wayside. Maybe we'll get some better writers out of it.
*I have a LOT of rants in my old notebooks about the No Two Sentences rule. I found that one to be idiotic. The proto-linguist in me did quite a job analyzing the role of the articles a and the, but the reader/writer in me just wanted to point out that similarly-constructed sentences could be an extremely effective stylistic tool.
