A long time ago, I was super excited to finally be in a creative writing class where I thought I could hone my craft by getting feedback from the teacher and other students who, I assumed, also loved writing and were driven to succeed. (And yes, I was naive back then and didn't realize most students take Creative Writing for an easy A). I was thrilled by the prospect of learning story, novel, and screenplay structure specifically for commercial projects, as in Best-Selling fiction and doing it in a group of like-minded individuals.
I'd been writing for years before I took this class, had already been published in The Denver Post and several national poetry anthologies, so I was figuring it out on my own, slowly but surely. I thought the class would help with my fiction, my true passion, and I honestly thought the teacher and most of the students were going to love my stories. My friends and family always had. I also thought that the teacher would read my work and single me out as an exceptionally talented writer. I expected him to gush and proclaim to the class how he knew I was destined to go on to become a Best-Selling rich and famous author and screenwriter.
Boy was I in for a rude awakening.
Turns out, this particular teacher literally hated everything I wrote. He said my stories were too formulaic and he despised popular, formulaic fiction, in other words fiction that sells. He thought it was garbage and preferred that writers in his class write experimental fiction. Art for art's sake.
Not only that, but this teacher felt the need to point out how he particularly loathed the way I used onomatopoeia. Loathed probably isn't the right word. He absolutely abhorred it, told me not to use it, ever, because words like POW! BANG! and SCHWING! were simply "too comic booky." They had no place in any work done in his class.
He flat out said, "Get rid of all that comic book shit, the POWS! and BANGS! Nobody writes like that. It's garbage, and so are your formulaic plots."
OUCH! My face flushed red; my body felt like it was on fire. I could hardly breathe. It felt like someone was stabbing me over and over again in the heart and lungs with a dull knife. I was beyond crushed. Young and naive, I was crushed but was too anxious to show just how crushed I was, so I simply stood there and shook my head and said, "Okay."
All I could think of was how much this teacher hated my work and what I could do to fix it and the awful, nauseous feelings of rejection and failure I, the only published author in the class, now had constantly brewing in the pit of my stomach.
Again, being young and naive, I somehow thought to be a successful writer, I needed this teacher's approval. I somehow felt he knew better than I did, so I took his advice and completely changed how and what I wrote. I was desperate for his approval and some kind of validation of my skills, some kind of acknowledgement that I had a future in this industry and wasn't going to waste my life trying to be successful at something I truly sucked at.
One day, this teacher announced that he was running a chapbook contest for his writing students. The top three students with the best chapbook, a small book full of poems and fiction, would win an award that would be presented during a nice awards ceremony. It was a big deal and because I'm me, I felt the only way to dig myself out of the endless pit of rejection and to gain some validation and earn my teacher's approval was to win the competition.
And so, I worked my tail off on my chapbook. I wrote and wrote and wrote, often writing at all hours of the day and night, and secretly writing in other classes, working on my stories when I should have been working on Science or Math or English or doing chores at home.
But I didn't just write, I changed my writing style to fit in with I thought he wanted, abstract, obscure, experimental fiction with no POWS! BANGS! or SCHWINGS! I was doing my best to emulate the types of stories other students, whose stories he liked, were writing. I tried so hard to emulate the voice and nonsense of stories he'd read to us by obscure authors of whom I'd never heard.
And worse, I tried to figure out how to emulate short stories he had written, short stories he loved, stories he had published in a very obscure college literary magazine in Boulder, Colorado in the 70s. (Need I say more?).
I wasn't having much luck. These stories didn't make sense to me, and I found that within all of them were alarming and disturbing themes and content.
I realized quickly that this teacher loved to read and write nonsensical stories that were blatantly vile, grossly misogynistic, pornographic and just plain disgusting. The student stories he liked mostly came from the males in the class. They never had a plot or a theme, or any real characterization, structure, plot, theme, or symbolism, etc.
What they did have was lots of naked women with all sorts of fetishes and LOTS and LOTS of sex. But these disgusting stories weren't all coming from the men. I remember one particular story, written by a woman, that was so graphically S&M pornographic, I almost left the classroom.
Had I not been an anxious mess, afraid to fail, afraid of rejection, so damned in need of validation, so afraid to publicly voice my disgust and the inappropriateness of the story, I'd have left and immediately gone to the Dean. But again, I was young and naive and even though I knew this class had crossed several lines, I was too scared to do anything about it.
Back to the S&M porn story. The teacher was infatuated with it, and I mean INFATUATED and so were most of the men in the class. In fact, most were on the edge of their seats. They were all in. And when it came time for feedback, they began ask totally inappropriate questions and making inappropriate comments about the woman in the story.
They were obsessed with the woman in the story and the author and her sex life. The writer, in her late teens, was clearly thriving on the attention. She confessed the story was true and that the main character was her and then she revealed even more of her fetishes to the class. The teacher, an OLD FART in his 60s, and most of the male students were salivating.
For those of us women in the class (there weren't many of us) and the decent males in the class, it was awful. Things took an even more awful turn when the conversation reverted to fetishes and the teacher went around the room asking each of us what our sexual fetish was.
I squirmed in my seat and refused to participate. Several others did the same thing. But not the writer, she went on to elaborate about more of her fetishes, in detail. All eyes were on her. I had to hand it to her; she had the undivided attention of everyone in the class. (It didn't dawn on me until years later that this woman was also in search of validation and she was using the one tool she knew would instantly give her control of the men in the room and get her the validation of our misogynistic porn-obsessed teacher.)
I wanted to puke. I wanted to run from the room screaming, "This is NOT what I signed up for," but I didn't. I stayed, as did the other women and decent men in the class.
Alarms were screaming in my head, but I was young, so I excused them, and I excused the teacher's behavior and that of the other men in the class. Why? Because that's what most women are taught to do from birth. It's engrained in us. And besides, this teacher was published, so he must know best. I was so desperate for someone to show me the path to success that I was willing to overlook everything, including the fact that he wasn't a "real" author. He'd simply self-published in a college literary magazine that he started, one that was no longer around.
Back to the story. I took from my experiences in this teacher's class and changed my writing style to fit (without venturing into the realms of porn or misogyny). I wrote an insane amount of content, mostly experimental fiction similar to some of the non-pornographic fiction this teacher liked. I even illustrated some of the pages. I was spending ungodly amounts of time on my chapbook. Writing stories and poems by hand, then typing them up.
I included one genre story, amongst countless experimental pieces and poetry. I then went to Kinkos and paid what felt like a huge amount of money to have my chapbook bound. It was beautiful and I felt so proud to have a bound book. I shared it with friends, and they loved the genre story and the poems, and I had a couple of friends say they even liked the experimental pieces because they were sci-fi and super creative and fun. (Yes, we were all sci-fi geeks at the time). And, ahem, I may or may not have dressed up as a Klingon for a Star Trek festival because I absolutely LOVED Michael Dorn, adored him as an actor and as a Klingon.
Moving on, I turned in my chapbook and knew from asking others in my class that it was the biggest. I had more pages, more stories, more poems than anyone else by far and I'd spend so many more hours than everyone else working on perfecting those stories and poems. Everyone in the class thought I was nuts, a total dork. I just smiled. I was so damned determined to win this competition and get the validation I so desperately needed that no amount of teasing could dampen my spirits.
The night of the awards ceremony, I remember butterflies in my stomach as I waited for the teacher to hand out the awards. He called up the third-place winner. I clapped. Phew, I didn't get third place. Awesome! I really liked the guy who took third. He was a decent guy and his stories were good.
The teacher then called up second place, the woman with the fetish stories. I clapped out of duty. Here we were on the first-place winner. I started to shake. Here it comes. Oh, my gosh. I must be the winner. But then the teacher opened his mouth and another name came out. The name of a disgusting guy who wrote the nastiest stories.
I was so upset and so discouraged that I almost slid out of my chair. I couldn't even offer a congratulatory smile or handshake. Heck, I couldn't even speak. I was doing everything in my power to hold in the hot tears stinging my eyes. I couldn't cry. Not here. Not now. But that was so hard. My inner jerk was screaming, "Well, that's it. You're done. You're never going to be a writer! You're never going to succeed! Just give up now! It's over. Nobody likes what you write! You're a failure."
At that moment, I decided to give up writing for a while and find something else to focus on, but then something strange happened...
Writing wouldn't give me up.
Writing is who I am. Before I understood what was happening, I was writing in my notebook once again, then writing on the computer. I couldn't suppress the urge. I had to write. Not only that, I had to write genre stories and I had to write them in my own voice. And even though I still felt like a failure, all of those dreams about publishing a book and writing a script that become a movie filled my heart and soul again. I realized that writing, for me, is either an addiction or my destiny, my reason for being here on Earth, or both.
And so, over the years, I kept going and I kept enduring knives to my heart and kicks to my guts, the ups and downs, mostly downs, of freelance writing. I spent years honing my craft, reading, educating myself, attending workshops, seminars, etc...
To get published, I switched to writing exclusively nonfiction for several years and wrote two health and fitness books that strangers actually bought! I was a regular contributor for several nationally published magazines, and I ran a dirt bike website where I wrote about all things dirt bike.
However, for as much as I loved nonfiction and the fact nonfiction actually pays, I was still pining to be a screenwriter, but I was afraid to admit it, afraid to pursue it. But then I had a serious dirt bike crash resulting in a pretty nasty head injury. When I regained consciousness, I had two thoughts:
Thought 1: "Huh, I think I just broke my neck."
Thought 2: "I have to quit my day job to pursue writing full-time."
After that, I wrote my first novel. It was super shitty and not anywhere near publishable, but I did it which proved to myself that I was capable of being a novelist. Shortly after I realized my novel wasn't going anywhere other than my computer's recycle bin, I decided to take a huge risk and make the transition to screenwriting. I signed up for UCLA Extension's Certificate in Feature Film Writing program.
From the first class, I felt at home. My very first instructor LOVED what I wrote, said my dialogue made him laugh so hard his sides hurt. He was so encouraging. In his class, we read a lot of professional scripts that were current movies. And you know what I found?
Onomatopoeia!!!
It was EVERYWHERE!
"The automatic door SHUSHES open."
"BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, the alarm, now armed..."
"RAAAAAAAAT, the ear-splitting sound of the impact wrench interrupts Bill."
I was beside myself. All this time, I'd been avoiding it thanks to that one jerk of a teacher, yet here screenwriters were making a living using the POWS and BANGS and SCHWINGS! And so I got over my fear of these auditorily magnificent words and began using them in my scripts, scripts that went on to win all kinds of awards and receive incredibly fantastic coverage.
FAST FORWARD years later...
I hadn't thought about that horrible creative writing class in years, but then last week, all of a sudden, as memories are wont to do, I was working on the 8,000th rewrite of my Nicholl Fellowship Semifinalist script, THE ONLY WAY OUT, writing words like:
"POW! CHURK! THWOMP! CAW!
...When suddenly my brain derailed, and a memory of that class popped into my head. I heard the teacher's voice loud and clear:
"Get rid of all that comic book shit, the POWS! and BANGS! Nobody writes like that. It's garbage, and so are your formulaic plots."
Huh, I smiled to myself thinking about all of the comic books and graphic novels my kids read. Where would they be without their POWS and BANGS?
I smiled even wider realizing that those same POWS and BANGS have resulted in the creation of five award-winning scripts, one of which, THE ONLY WAY OUT, now has 2 producers and a director attached and is circulating around Hollywood in search of A-list talent.
I realized in that moment that there are so many times in life in which losing is for the best and, in fact, losing is actually winning.
SHAZAAAAAAM!
For laughs, while you wait for the next blog post, be sure to check out Episode 10 of MAMA FIX IT™.
Persistence and Resilience is what I see in your writing.