Good Writing

"Don't get me wrong�logic and reason have their place,"
-a hilarious The Onion article.

So I just got back from Fiction Writing.

In our now-customary post-class analysis, K. Elizabeth Bates and I agreed that The Staggering Genius needs to be silenced. I sat next to him today, and sitting so close to that Abercrombie-and-Fitch sporting critic, with his delicately mussed hair and endearingly hidden nervous tic, I just didn't have the heart to say "shut up!"

He's smart, he's a good (not great) writer and a great (not good) critic, but he just talks and talks and talks… it's all one sentence, and you never know when it will end. Once, he prefaced something with "Now my only question is…" only to continue talking for two minutes. Ultimately, the anticipated question mark failed to appear… it was just another soliloquy on his own critical skills.

So that was annoying--if he weren't so good at talking, I think everyone would notice that he sometimes says absolutely nothing, after all the nice-sounding words are gone--but, well, meh.

I've read something of his, and I got to call it "borderline racist" in class--before anyone else had, no less--so he can talk all he wants. I think I owe him, especially after comparing his well-intentioned work to Finding Forrester…

Now The Sentimentalist… she talks almost as much and writes twice as poorly. I don't feel the need to bring her down (starting… now…), but The Staggering Genius was complaining about her today, and that seemed a little ironic; she's trying to do what he's doing.

It's amusing that Prof Dintenfass waits as long as he can before calling on them.

Actually, I will bring her down. We're all better critics than we are writers (I'm no exception), so naturally even the worst writer (and she isn't the worst) has something useful to add, but her comments are always negative. It's like she doesn't actually like any of the stuff we read… and I can't see how she could think so highly of her own writing only to bash writing that is so obviously better.

So far, the best story has been Miss Bates' Green Burial, a story about a guy who can't forget his girlfriend's abortion. But, in a bizarre twist, the second-best story came from the unlikeliest source of all: Roy the Effeminate Heterosexual.

His story, Kissing In The Dark With His Eyes Closed, is well-written and very very gay. It's unabashed Gay Erotica, as far as the genre goes, and I predict a very interesting discussion on Thursday.

So: class has been fun…