Th Creative Writing part of my degree covered genres, styles, poetry, professional writing, articles, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novel-writing and even some level of scripting. We also did a lot of analysis and even had an entire lecture (including workshops) on how to give and receive constructive feedback.

The Screenwriting half of my degree did none of that. We watched movies and shows and we learned how to structure scripts and how writer's rooms worked, which is all useful, but in hindsight I truly wish I could have just done all of that in a six month semester long unit in Creative Writing because that's about the amount of information that was disseminated by the screenwriting course over the 3 years.

And those people in the Screenwriting half who were NOT doing Creative Writing (doing film or drama etc.) were notably less advanced in their skills by the final year. That's not to say they were BAD writers (although some of them were, that's true of all Writing degrees, sometimes people refuse to be taught because they think they know everything already despite being at a place to learn) but they were less adept at giving feedback on other people's writing beyond "i didn't like it" or "it was clunky" without being able to verbalise why and how it was clunky. They were less able to paint a picture of the world they were creating or fine-tune character specific dialogue, which is all stuff you expect to be able to do as a screenwriter. It's not just that we should stop listening to screenwriters it's that even screenwriters should be taking more writing advice from more diverse sources like poetry or novel writers. The books people DO recommend for screenwriting (like Save the Cat, which most good writers I know have beef with) should not be seen as the blueprint but as supplement advice you can take or leave - which is what was so useful about covering so many things in the Creative Writing half of my degree.

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

Read more books. Read more reviews. Pay closer attention to the TV shows and movies you watch. In other words, take note of how each story progresses. Think more deeply about why you like a story or why you don't.

But then here comes a horde of fandomites calling me a bully and an abuser for daring to say that your art is trite, acting like I'm personally forbidding each of you from having fun on the internet.

If you people don't want to improve, be my guests. But I have a blog, and I can comment on culture and literature however I please. I should be allowed to say your art sucks without receiving this much vitriol.

mostly when I hear people critique media they use the questions

is this realistic?

does this make logical sense?

those are two reasonable questions, but they are geared to serve domestic realism - stories that follow linear narratives, take place within and are meant to be viewed within consensus reality, and are in conversation with other stories doing the same thing. 

sometimes the answer to these questions might be “no.” and quite often, people treat that “no” like it means that piece of media is inherently bad. but it’s doesn’t. it just means that media might be doing something else. 

the essay “The eaters and the critics: Notes on (restaurant) criticism, 2018-2019″ in @oficmag’s second issue had some other suggestions that got me thinking:

is it interesting?

do I like it?

is it good?

(the whole essay is really great, as is the rest of the issue - go check it out!)

as a fan, I typically engage with low-budget genre fiction. quite often, genre media is not realistic and does not make logical sense. in the last fifteen years, some genre media (like Game of Thrones, the MCU, etc.) has achieved ascendancy in the cultural mainstream, which means that people have begun applying to that media the kinds of critical questions that best serve domestic realism.

now, is the MCU bad? I mean, yeah, I think it is. but not because it’s not realistic, you feel me? 

some other useful questions might be: 

what does this piece of media make me feel and think?

what do I want out of this piece of media? (enjoy it? hate it? think it’s beautiful? think it’s ugly? feel challenged? feel superior? etc., etc.) why? 

do I trust the authors of this piece of media to do what they’re doing on purpose? why or why not?

who is funding this piece of media? could the source of its funds influence its themes, plot, characters, etc.? does this matter to me?

can I get what I want out of this piece of media even if the authors aren’t doing it on purpose? even if they are? if I shift my perspective on this piece of media, will I get what I want from it more easily?

what are the goals of this piece of media? does it achieve those goals? how? 

what are the rules of reality the media sets up in its first pages/episodes/etc.? is this piece of media consistent with the rules of reality it sets up, even if those rules aren’t the same as the rules of consensus reality? 

if the piece of media is not consistent with its own rules, is it breaking those rules arbitrarily, or is it using that to examine, question, or draw your attention to something?

The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Nghi Vo 

With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.

Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.

learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."

ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.

The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:

quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.

it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?

which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.

This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting (edit to respond to some legitimate comments in the reblogs: I bring up Trainspotting because it's written in Scots and Scottish English, not just Scots, but I agree that this isn't the best example as the Scots portions are not part of this conversation in the same way; consider Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston as a better example, and apologies for the confusion!) wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.

To wit, less of this shite:

There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (One of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels by the very English Dorothy L. Sayers, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be a Scottish accent; I'd not be bringing it up if it were a Scottish author writing in Scots)

and more of this:

"Are we straight so?"

"Aye, we're straight," said Jim.

"Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)

ahlam bsharat is a palestinian writer who grew up in a village in northern palestine. she completed her master’s degree in arabic literature at an-najah national university in nablus. in addition to poetry, she is well-known as a YA and childrens book author, and has also written short stories, novels, memoirs, and television and radio scripts. two of her young adult novels have been translated into english: trees for absentees and codename: butterfly. you can find her on twitter @/ahlambsharaa.

IF YOU READ JUST ONE POEM BY AHLAM BSHARAT, MAKE IT THIS ONE

OTHER POEMS ONLINE I LOVE BY AHLAM BSHARAT (all translated from arabic to english)

I Saw a Dead Road on the Road (translated by zeina hashem) at arab lit

My Sixteen-Year-Old Mother (translated by omnia amin) at

'67 Children (translated by m lynx qualey) at arab lit

Obediah the Cow (translated by fady joudah) at the baffler

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a war crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.