Dude your writing is so stunning. I was gonna ask if you took any creative writing courses or something and saw you majored in literature so like no wonder lol. I wish to write as good as you but as someone who wants to drop out of college I dont see that happening. Anyway you're awesome and I hope you have a good day šš
Ā I am going to tell you a secret.
I did not learn how to write like this in college.
Most of my creative writing classes (and I only took 4) taught me to read. They were all workshops, and collaborative, and I learned how to read a piece of writing and identify what it was about--and thatās very different from identifying what the writer intended to write. It taught me to read a story about an adult whose divorced mother is remarrying and say, āOkay, but I donāt think that this story is about the capitalist recompartmentalization of families the way that the title seems to indicate. I think that the questions posed by the premise are āwhere are my roots? where does my identity come from? what dynamics do I retreat to when I need to feel safe, and what do I do when that refuge is taken away?āā And identifying what a story is actually about is a very important part of the writing and revision process. Workshops also taught me to take critique without taking it personally, and to assess what was a critique worth taking, and whether the giver knew what they were talking about and what their opinion is worth.
Most of my literature courses taught me to think critically--in the sense of āidentify this and examine what it means.ā What does it mean, in Parable of the Sower, that empathy can be weaponized and used to incapacitate others? What does it mean, in RENT, that Benny is offering the protagonists jobs in their fields and theyāre eschewing in favor of authenticity and integrity? What does Watership Down have to say about the nature-vs.-nurture argument and its limitations?
But I did not learn how to write like this in college. I learned how to write like this from fandom.
Some things came pre-loaded. I like writing dialogue, and Iāve been told Iām good at it, and I think itās because eventually I worked out that nobody ever manages to say exactly what they mean and communication is frequently less like an arrow aiming for a target and more like a small boat bumping up against a dock while the people onboard try to tie their ropes to secure it. I like characters over action, and thatās reflected in the stories I tell--all very heavy character-driven stories, where the ratio of introspection to actual events is very high.
Z. Z. Packerās āDrinking Coffee Elsewhereā taught me to appreciate the way that characterization leads to action; but I never put that into practice until I went on (forgive me) tumblr and started reading meta. dear-wormwoods is one of my biggest sources of Eddie characterization meta, and that has influenced my fics more than anything else in fandom, though weāve never spoken. When I was reading bagginshield, I read aveleraās meta for them.
But Iāve also found that many of the best meta writers (that Iāve found anyway) are also the best writers Iāve read. I went straight from aveleraās bagginshield literary analysis to their Pacific Rim fanfiction āthe only way out is downā and reading their commentary on how they shaped the work during revision. I read amargueriteās āSome Friendlier Skyā (Les Miserables fanfiction) and then āAn Ever-Fixed Markā (Pride and Prejudice) and I started asking her questions--āyou compare Courfeyrac to a cat, and then Mr. Darcy to a cat, even though theyāre very different characters. Whatās the thought process there?ā and she told me and we talked about it. I read chrononauticalās āA Road from the Gardenā (The Hobbit) and went line by line picking out the things I liked in the comment, and I had this sudden epiphany about how Tolkien shows the dwarves as sets of brothers, which means that they are technically a race of brothers in their presentation, so it was GENIUS to play around with the brother dynamic in a work like that and reflect on how frequently an individual will tolerate mistreatment of themselves that they would never permit to happen to someone they loved--like, say, a brother.
I learned the basics of literary criticism and critical analysis from college, and from reading the western canon and trying to pick apart things that were useful to me. But itās so much easier when everything is written in vernacular instead of faux-detached academic writing, and when everyone involved is genuinely excited about and dedicated to the work instead of being forced to dwell on The Old Man and the Sea yet again, and when thereās space for people to go back and forth analyzing and agreeing or saying ābut what ifā or rejecting and are just united by this love of the content or the characters or the book or the history.
You can learn to write like--well, you would write like you, not like me, thatās how style is. But you donāt have to go to college to do it. My current style is not the product of the institution that gave me my degree--itās the product of more recent yearsā immersion in fanfiction (and more recently some traditionally published original work) and music and content I get for free online. And you can also get a circle of people who are happy to write together, read each otherās work, comment on each otherās strengths and the things they like, make suggestions as to how to improve things. You donāt have to do that in college. You just have to read and write a lot, and the things that you read will influence what writing you produce, and in identifying what you like about the things you read and how they do the things they do, you will be able to look at your own work critically and shape it more towards your satisfaction.
The work Iām writing for IT is some of the best work of my life. TTHAEL is the first long work Iāve completed to my satisfaction. Indelicate is the first thing Iāve written that I feel is really exemplary of my style. Margotās Room is the first self-contained short work Iāve completed to my satisfaction--and the first explicit sexual content Iāve written that Iām happy with both level of detail and atmosphere. Even Automatic-Mechanical-Pneumatic--which I wrote and posted in the same day, so itās more of a draft--I look at it and recognize it has pacing issues (you can tell I was racing a clock to get the words out), some of the symbolism is too overt because the characters are too self-aware of it, at one point I tripped up and referred to a character by the real-world inspiration--but thatās a solid draft and it has good parts.
You donāt have to go to college to learn to write. Writing is a skill, and writing is work. And there are advantages that people in colleges have re: networking and libraries and available resources and professors who are being paid to give you feedback. But no institution is going to put you through a four-year program and at the end youāll come out a āfinishedā writer, with no more room to improve. Thatās something you have to do on your own.









