It's remarkably easy to read that book (and bio) as being ghostwritten by someone other than the purported author, who perhaps interviewed to get or transcribed from a tape the general gist of the work, and carefully portioned off the words for which they felt the most contempt. (Art? I'll give him "art"....)
Plus, it's so... random. Why is it "growing cult of 'personality' authors" and not "growing 'cult of personality' authors"? The mind boggles. And wonders if you could perhaps do a psych study based on the words that were selected to be quotationalized.
Actually it reminds me a lot of the last doctor's report I got, the one where they put "Fibromyalgia" in quotation marks the whole time. I'm not returning to that doctor, ever, and I think I'll give this book a miss for similar reasons.
On the plus side, this has been a fascinating and often amusing education in More Of What Not To Do To Be a Successful Writer. And I do so love a good disemvoweling.
Err, also, Mr. Rice, you should probably note there are plenty of people who do, unashamedly, self-identify as 'geeks', and even some who equally unashamedly self-identify as 'freaks', and even some who happily identify as both a freak and a geek, and wear bunny ears in public. Though that last bit could just be me.
With the possible exception of disability lawyers, who will work for a percentage of your back-funds if they think it's winnable (or so I understand; I'll know more if I get turned down on my own again).
The weird thing about writing/crit groups is they make no sense in terms of population. They're all over the place in Pittsburgh--I learn about a new or new to me one nearly every year--but I've got a friend in NY, NY who can't find any that are genre. (If you count Alpha, Pittsburgh has five that are just genre, three of which can be blamed on one person.) However, if you really want and care enough about it, it's still surprisingly easy to start one. I've had plenty of other friends go that route successfully, and really, most established writing groups have that somewhere in their history: someone in the group wanted people to crit their stuff, and couldn't conveniently find anyone to do so. This person may or may not end up in charge of the group later on. (In WorD, this special place is reserved for Diane Turnshek, who we generally obey but who doesn't really run the group any more because she doesn't have time. If you or anyone you know comes across a Time Turner, please ship it to us immediately as she desperately, desperately needs it.)
The only difficult bits of making your own group are getting good people and establishing good guidelines. (Well, a meeting place can be somewhat difficult, but many libraries will have some sort of meeting room they're willing to donate to you, and in time the librarians may become fond enough to defend you to patrons and give you donuts even though the library is strictly no eating or drinking. True anecdotes.) Good guidelines can be obtained off the 'net, and you can simply present them as the unconditional rules at the first meeting, which will weed out some of your more problematic attendees right away. (WorD shamelessly stole our initial procedures from the former Worldwrights, for example.) Getting people isn't hard, either; you put up notices in bookstores, colleges, coffee shops, and other places writers congregate--I believe the Houston group my friends started took its core group from NaNoWriMo 2002. Getting good people requires a bit more work, but if you set up your guidelines right and phrase your notices to encourage what you're looking for, that helps. So does starting the group with a few friends or acquaintances, so you can drive out the problems by force of personality.
(It's very likely that any group of people meeting for a social or recreational purpose can, if deposited in a different and stressful location, instantly turn into an episode of Survivor.)
Even if the group isn't great, even an adaquate group will usually help you more than nothing at all, or just giving your work to your friends and/or teachers.
I admit, though, I'm spoiled--Write or Die meets at my local library, so when I decided I was really, truly serious about this, I just wandered into a meeting. It was a ready-made group where I fit in perfectly, to the point I was ready to put something on the chopping block for my third meeting (and it didn't even hurt too badly). Through this group, since it's open, I've also learned something that ties into an above comment: there are some good writers who don't give good critiques, and there are some mediocre writers who give extraordinary critiques. The skills involved in writing are not the same skills involved in being good at spotting problems in writing, which is another reason people have such a hard time telling if their own writing is good or not--because developing the eyes of a critiquer require an entirely different approach and workout than developing writing skills, so that even the people who are trying to put the time and effort into being a good writer may never realize how to be good at analyzing that writing.
So what I've found to be true is, the easiest way to start building up the ability to tell if you own work is good... is to start taking apart other people's work looking for the same thing.
Also: you can synthesize the Slushpile experience from the convenience of your own home by signing up as a moderator for any kind of online story archive. I spent about six months doing this for Elfwood, and forever will have a scar on my soul from one suicide story so bad it made me want to kill myself. I have no idea why a site specifically for genre stories gets so many about people ending it all in a distinctly non-genre way, though it's probably the teenager factor. I just know one thing: yes, the slushpile really is that bad, if not worse. (And also, watching MTS3K and learning how to mock the atrocity you're reading can help, a lot.)
Pittsburgh flooded. Well, okay, not all of it. Just bits. A lot of bits. And then there were the mudslides. My house is currently enjoying the decorative fad of wet plastic sheeting and water-filled buckets, and in one case a tub, but considering some (relatively) nearby people were stuck on their roofs and something like 100,000 people in the area are without power, we got off fairly lucky (I'm thankful my suburb is on high ground). We're not really prepared for this sort of thing (sure, the Point regularly goes underwater during Winter and Spring, but that just adds character).
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| 2004 | 6 |
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