Kids These Days and New Blogger!

Dear Kira,

I understand your concern about reading. It is concerning that there seems to be a down trend in classics reading. It seems that all anyone wants to read is Twilight and Fifty Shades of Stupid. Kids these days.

But I do think the issue is a little more complicated than that. I mean, there is a some middle ground between The Iliad and The Vampire Diaries. Not everyone is cut out to read Shakespeare. So, it's sort of hard to decide what counts as a high quality book. Also, I think it's not quite realistic to expect kids to read Byron (and as we know from English 201, it's not realistic to expect me to read Byron either).

I think the most important thing is that kids think reading is fun. Perhaps this is naive, but I think that once kids discover that reading is fun, they'll eventually move on to reading the classics. What's needed to promote the reading of classics is to make them fun and interesting. Most kids first encounter classics at school; there's no better way to get a teenager to dislike a book then to force them to read it, then write a five paragraph essay about it. That leads me to my next question. Do you think that forcing kids to read in school encourages or discourages them?

And now for something completely different.

I would like to welcome a new contributor to In Your Write Mind! Her name is Keri and she's so very fly, oh my, it's a little bit scary. Keri is a voracious reader, an excellent writer, and will be adding a new voice to our literary discussions. She's also a fan of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, so she's obviously well qualified. Keri's writing specialty is alien fiction; if you want to check out some of her other writing, you can read her blog The 2013 Machine.

Welcome, Keri!

Maria

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

I'm a Cliche & You Can't Judge a Book by It's Cover

Dear Kira,

First off, let me take a moment to address the sad state of my NaNoWriMo affairs. As you know, I am lagging behind by, count them, nearly three thousand words. That's almost a thousand more words than there have been years in the common era! But, I digress.

I think the point you brought up in your last blog is very important because, let's face it, we all have that moment when we're sitting in English class and the teacher is asking us, "what does this sentence mean? What is this a symbol for? Is Gatsby actually a murderer? Aw! The ambiguity". It bothers me that English teachers are all fine and dandy when famous authors write something vague, but if I write something vague or ambiguous in a short story, they're all like "um...I think you need to clarify this..." and I'm all like "but actually, I did that deliberately."

:P

So, to answer your question, I don't think there is any wrong or right way to write a novel. There is only the "write" way. Wow, that was a pun. Anyway, I think it's important to remember that most of the great writers are only great because they took risks and wrote in a way no one expected and no one had ever seen before. Sure, there's certainly bad writing out there (cough, cough Twilight), but I think there's more good writing than people think.

I think it's kind of unfair how some books are designated as "classics", as if they are some how better than other books. I think we already discussed this when I told you that my favorite book was Ivanhoe. To me, Ivanhoe is one of the best books ever written, but to another person it might just be obnoxious (sorry that I made you read it). And, conversely, there are a whole bunch of books I wish I could add to the canon of classics. So, really, what is "good" writing, is all a matter of taste. Don't get me wrong, the "classics" are classics for a reason, but I think there should be a little more wiggle room when deciding the merit or quality of a book. What do you think? Are the classics concrete or is there room to mix and match?

Maria

P.S. I know that was a cop out question, but I had to hurry up and write this so I could work on my NaNoWriMo; heavy sigh.