Classically Confused

Good morning, Maria it's (early) on Friday, and let me just say, after our 1AM writing sprints last night (this morning?), I'm feeling this major resistance (read: kicking and screaming) to any kind of writing, so excuse me if this post is some sorry rambling about things.

So, as you might have gathered from my Growing Pains post, I wasn't a huge fan of the classics, nor did I give myself any motivation to read them until recently. But instantly I realized I was living in some void that was filled by clichéd plot lines and characters that go, "you f***ed my wife? You f***ed my wife?" "I AM your wife!" (yay Eddie Izzard). So pretty quickly, I'm learning the importance of classic literature.

But then again what are the true classics? An interesting point. We have our basics: Shakespeare, Dickens, and obviously Lemony Snicket, but there are plenty of other well known books that aren't yet classics: Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, to name a few. For a few years, I was off bemoaning the fact that a book couldn't be reputable unless you threw a few "thee" and "thous" in there, and if the author had been dead for a few hundred years.

But then, senior year of high school, I took a class called Modern Classics, and I was basically through the roof that I could read a Jodi Picoult novel and call it classic literature. Whether or not anyone else believed me is another story. But only then did I realize that you can't just have "classics" and, for lack of a better word (I'm running on 6 hours of sleep, cut me some slack), "non-classics." Within a certain genre, you can have some books that are better known and more respected than others. Genre classics aren't just a cop-out; they're simply just a result of humans loving to categorize stuff.

It seems like the authors of classics locked themselves into their writing lairs, not letting anyone see a single word until the emerged back into the real world. I'm just basing this off speculation, but most of the great writers seem like very private people. It pays off when their writing is un-touched by any other personality; it's their own heart in the purest form (other than, y'know, their actual heart). Yet modeling your own writing methods is difficult for someone who announces it to the world when her toe itches. Plus, after showing some of my un-finished work with family and friends, I get ideas from them I would never think of on my own. I see awkward sentences I never would have caught on my own, not that I would ever let myself write a run-on, that's just stupid, hey do we have any chocolate left? My writing seems cleaner after showing it to the outside world, and it puts me in a better position to face the rest of my novel (poem, script, screenplay, etc).

So my question is this: Do you think it's better to let your writing simmer and cool (careful, it's hot!) and keep the public eye from it for a while, or can it be helpful to have others edit your work and give suggestions as you go?

Gotta go write a bajillion more words about vampires. Or something.

Peace and Ponies,

Kira