Unhappiness with Travel Writing teacher aside, the break was a good time for me to reflect and write. I wrote a lot about possible travel writing paper ideas, and I cam up with some good travel episodes to meditate on and see what good can come of them. I don't think anything will as long as I have to "model" other authors, but I remain optimistic.

In other news, I am having a difficult time deciding what I am going to do next with my life. I know I want to go to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but I need to be realistic as well. I haven't been writing a lot of good pieces lately. What will I put in my portfolio? Is the writer's workshop the best creative writing program for me? What will I need to do to get into an MFA program? How will I pay for it? I haven't really allowed myself to think past this semester or this year or this undergraduate work. I don't have a clue what's next for me.

I do know that I am feeling Colorblind and my other novel in progress, though.

Gotta go to class.

Once was blind,
Erica

Clash of the Titans

Is there anyway to kill someone that is already dead? I believe my Travel Writing professor is dead and has been buried in an unmarked 18th century grave. His spirit still haunts our English department. He's trying not to get back to the 18th century, but to supplant our present culture with it.

One reason that I have for not liking him is his insistence that he knows better than anyone what makes good writing in the pompous way that one would expect of a Yale or Harvard scholar. He thinks that I don't write succintly enough to be published, that my writing is too indulgent. He said that after I told him I don't write to model other people; I write the things I want to read because they have not yet been written. I write so that other people can pick up my literature and see, finally, themselves. Indulgence? I write indulgently because I am starving. I have to cook my own intellectual food. The only reason I bothered to take the class was to learn something about a kind of writing I hadn't seen much of before, and perhaps to appreciate someone else's style and try it on for size, but never to buy.

I won't take the Camille approach and say the way I write is my signature style and what is going to get me published, or I, too, would probably be eliminated. But I will say that negative examples don't work for me. I guess I am non-traditional in that way. If I write self-indulgently, it's because I have't eaten the treat of creativity in a while; if I build Notre Dame and Versailles as opposed to condominums and time shares, it's because I want to live there amongst the rambling rooms and bric-a-brack.

This is why one should never write when one is upset. Emotion is not succint.

I am finally, finally in a class where I get to write something other than term papers, and so far we have spent the first five and a half weeks reading other people's writing. I'm still waiting for the point where we actually get to do some substantial writing that is not based on imitation of anyone else's writing.

So my first real writing assignment of the class of any substantial nature was to take a trip into the local town and ride the bus to somewhere we hadn't been (or that we could pretend we hadn't been too), take copious notes, and write "two fine paragraphs" one "modeled on a fine paragraph in one of the works we have already read." Despite the depressing aspect of the project--imitate someone else?-- I managed to become inspired. One of the strengths of my writng has always been my attention to detail in description and my remarkable perception. I see and hear everything, and I can convey what I see and hear well, so this is exactly the type of writing I can be good at.

So how did the writing come out? It was good, the best I'd written in a while. I wish I could have written about Florida, but it was good, especially for the level of motivation I set out with.

I really want to write about Florida, all of the things I did. I discovered a new level of competency in myself. I used to think that I could do nothing but write well--everything else I did would be mediocre at best. This summer I discovered that I do have other talents. But I'll always be a writer.