thebibliosphere:

morgynleri:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”

What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?

I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.

I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.

Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.

Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.

Shakespeare’s work had a LOT of dick jokes in his work that the people of the time would have understood. Also, speculative fiction has taken a LONG time to be acknowledged by creative writing teachers because there is a huge rift between commercial fiction (such as fantasy/science fiction/mystery) and literary fiction (the ones that win the awards and have editors coveting the work). So in that sense, creative fiction writing was ‘how do you describe growing up in New York during the 1980s by your wealthy aunt because your father died in an accident at work and your mother was a socialite who had a complete mental breakdown in Macy’s on Thanksgiving?’ to ‘tell me about the war of the werewolves in the middle ages’ because otherwise People. Won’t. Attend. Creative. Writing. Classes. And. We. Will. All. Be. Out. Of. The. Job. And. Traditional. Publishing. Has. Changed. And. There. Is. More. Then. The. Major. Publishers. Now.