How Seminar Made Me Angry About Art
Tonight I saw Seminar, the play with Alan Rickman as a writing teacher, one-act comedy, fairly tightly paced. And then I stomped home in a fugue of building irritation about what it means to be a writer, which is a topic that writers are obsessed with, and consistently, maddeningly, seem to get wrong.
( In which I am angry about this play as well as the literary world at large. )
( In which I am angry about this play as well as the literary world at large. )
That's why I don't want to study creative writing-aside from WHAT WOULD I DO WITH THAT DEGREE, I really hate the discipline, not even necessarily for the discipline itself but for the people it attracts. No one chooses to teach creative writing, and everyone who chooses to become a student of that goes in believing that their art supersedes everything else about them which means ego-jockeying in the name of artistic superiority, and no. No. I love writing! I want to get published! But I like writing stories about girl wizards and wicked queens and shamelessly aesthetically indulgent spy larks and everything under the sun, including young adult fiction, genre, pulp, and I don't want the constraint of being told that X art is better than Y art. I don't think it's worthless to be taught art; tutorial, critique, technique are invaluable things. But only if everyone involved cares and can take their ego out of it-critic and subject-and I don't see that happening in class. Not when we're culturally instilled to believe that we must either feel guilty or godly for making art with no in-between, when the only choice if you're part of the system is to convince yourself that you are doing the world a service BY EXISTING.
Ach. Incoherency. Frustration. This play is still getting to me, and so's the world.
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