The most interesting person I’ve ever met happens to be a writer, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that was just an instance of happenstance. For the most part, the writing industry is equal parts dullards and Dos Equis men just as the accounting industry, or animal husbandry industry, or the bible repair industry. Unfortunately, the writing world has never been lacking in ego or narcissism, and as a result the general public is subjected to many a film, TV show, play, novel, novella, short story, sestina, villanelle, and haiku by writers about writers for writers. Writers are given a forum with which to share their narcissism. Admittedly, I’m on occasion guilty of this myself, but I’m relatively unsuccessful and those who have been subjugated to my work heavily rooted in the self have more often not complained, but rather bought me a drink or seven, and patted me assuredly on the back. “There, there,” they say, “there, there.”
The problem starts early on in the writer’s evolution. The institutionalization of writing has meant that writers now learn to write in MFA programs, as opposed to the old route where aspiring writers would simply read books, get drunk, find a pen, and see what happens. There are certain tropes of the creative writing pedagogy. One, of course, is using the term pedagogy as often as possible. Another is to tell students to “show don’t tell”, which is indeed great advice for writing, yet bad advice for flirting. Recently, the term “learnable moment” has become very popular, but I still have no idea as to how that’ll help me write a good paradelle. But the most dangerous and misleading teaching is the notion of “writing what you know”. This, is where we’ve gone wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.
“Writing what you know” has led to creative writing workshops filled with pieces about bad university dorm experiences, the problems with parents and mean boyfriends, and the increasingly popular “things that happened to me yesterday while on Ritalin”. I had one professor who thankfully went the other way on this, suggesting “if it happened to you, don’t write it. It’ll never be as interesting for anyone else.” He would also take aspiring writers writing what they knew to task, telling many that their pieces should be titled “My Name is (insert name) and This Once Happened to Me”. Of course, he also advised that I own more knives, took Viagra recreationally and not for sexual purposes, and then asked to borrow my girlfriend, so…
