hearing on a documentary that Tolkien would put LotR aside for months on end, and that sometimes it took CS Lewis nagging him to get him going again.

t grin I understand Tolkein also worked on whatever scene took him that day. He wrote large chunks of TTT before he worked out what happened in FoTR.

Connie, not judgmental at all, sweetie. I took the courses in history (love those), not writing. But I do sometimes feel like a martian, because a single mention of "ah, the professor's book on deconstructing postmodernism" will set off a huge roll of conversation - it seems to be a prereq. And I often find that a tad snotty, truth to tell; "you haven't read Derrida? Oh, dear." Why, no - I actually studiously avoided reading more than a snippet.

Which, as it happens, seems to me to be the college version of judgemental. What Betsy said, about the classes that don't get in the way of the writing? Those are ones I'd line up to take.

But I do tend to resent the One True Way theory. And I resent anything at all that tells writers - including and especially great fanfic writers - that they MUST DO THIS or they aren't "real" writers.

That's all.

edit: um, not sure if this is clear - I don't think studying the underpinnings is anything other than excellent, and I don't think it necessarily contaminates the creative process. I do think it can contaminate it (if the writer is uncertain of themself to begin with), so the underpinnings should be studied with that possibility in mind. And I do not now, nor ever shall, believe that the underpinnings of the idea have anything to do with the personal execution of same.

Most of my writing classes were crit groups that didn't even get as far as talking about submitting things for publication. Out of the four different teachers I had, two were fabulous. Of the two that weren't, neither were awful. One facilitated the crit group, but I honestly can't remember a thing the man said. Another was a brilliant writer herself, but I got a feeling that she preferred the students who wrote in a style or on subjects that were close to her own writing.

Of the two very good ones, one had a way of pointing out the "badfic" aspects of our writing honestly, but in a way that wasn't hurtful (and was often very funny). The other was very good at sussing out what her students were trying to achieve in their writing and helping them to see what was working and what wasn't.

I never really took any writing courses that focused on structure. I picked up some in my literature classes, but that was about it. I also like reading what other writers have to say about the writing process and how they construct plots, pace things out, etc. It's fascinating to see how different writers come up with very different ways of going about their craft.

I haven't read Derrida either. My writing classes were like Susan W.'sThey did force me to finish stuff once a week, though.

Oh, I'm all about writers support groups and crit groups, Am. Love 'em. We have one now. But the main motto is, Thou Shalt Not Trash Anyone Else's Work.

Ever read Ngaio Marsh's autobiography? She talks about pretty much every aspect of her life, travels and theatre and colonialism, and you keep waiting for a mention of how she came up with stuff, and there's almost nothing, and you get to the end and WHAM, you suddenly realise, she's handed the basis for her worldview and how and why she created Roderick and Troy Alleyn, all there in where she'd been.

No, I didn't know there was one. Cool. I did read Christie's though, at one time.

(and I lurve Diana Gabaldon's stuff, but I haven't read "Fiery Cross" yet)

I've never been into literary criticism, per se. I always get lost in the abstruse terminology and navel-gazing of it all. I don't care if it's self-referential or building off the post-modernists (whoever the hell they are, I've never understood the Schools of Thought thing), just--does the thing tell a good story? Does it illuminate some facet of life? Heck, if nothing else, did it move you to some authentic emotion--even if it was just being so mortally offended that you threw it across the room?

(I thought Fiery Cross was her best book since Dragonfly in Amber. She actually succeeded in making me like Brianna and Roger almost as much as Jamie and Claire.)

does the thing tell a good story? Does it illuminate some facet of life? Heck, if nothing else, did it move you to some authentic emotion--even if it was just being so mortally offended that you threw it across the room?

YES.

And there's that mention of instinct again, oblique. At what point, between the litcrit and the fifty navel-gazing reference books and the professor who wrote a delicate little novel in which he almost managed to sustain his own interest for a hundred and eighteen pages and is still bitter because no one wanted to review it in a university article, do we, not only as writers but as readers, begin to trust our own reactions without the whole "you must do it this way or you are invalid" crap?