I’m about to start teaching creative writing and composition once a week to a group of 11th and 12th graders in Harlem.  Many of them will struggle with basic reading and writing comprehension, but my goal is to get them excited about telling their own stories, but also to respect the craft: to understand that editing is an important part of any artistic process, that attention to details helps the final product, and that constant practice (via writing and reading regularly) can only make their own creative and academic writing better.

So what kind of stuff do I want to encourage them to read in order to get excited about books and about writing their own stories?  My mind automatically goes to “the classics,” a list of books many of which I haven’t even read myself (cue the guilt).  But are these the best works to get them excited?

The bigger question is this: Is a classic work of literature (fiction and nonfiction included) always “good” writing?

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It’s a rare–and highly interesting–phenomenon when the success of a character overwhelms even its creator.

A. A. Milne found Winnie the Pooh’s popularity a source of profound annoyance. Despite his credentials as an established author and playwright, few took his “adult” work seriously after the success of Pooh.

J. M. Barrie had the same troubles with Peter Pan, who entirely overshadowed Barrie’s other works, past and future.

Better-known are the woes of Arthur Conan Doyle. The writer absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle believed was distracting him from his more important literary pursuits. So plagued by the stature of his own creation, Conan Doyle resorted to throwing Holmes off a cliff in 1893. Public demand and financial need prompted Conan Doyle to revive the famous detective a decade later. The detective has not died since. Read more »

Just one of many negative perspectives of the Twilight saga.

An ambitious sophomore in high school three years ago, I checked out Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Striving to seem mature and sophisticated, I lugged the book around for over a month. It was the hardest read of my entire life. The worst part is I had no clue as to its significance. Grasping the bare bones of the plot, I knew there was more the novel wanted to communicate.

Sure, one reason I didn’t catch the significance was because I was a sophomore in high school. In my first year of college though, I’ve discovered I’m not the only person confused. There are whole courses devoted to Dostoyevsky and The Brothers Karamazov; the underlying significances, symbols, motifs and so on.

Maybe I should’ve stuck to Harry Potter like the rest of my classmates.

In my short time, it seems the literary world places most value on novels with human messages, even more so on novels taking long intricate routes to get to those messages. However, it seems the literary world also tends to cast novels not adhering to such standards as a “literature of diversion” as Jonathan Franzen puts it.

At school, literary high brows’ nostrils flare at the sight of a Twilight or Harry Potter novel. “That’s not real literature,” they say. I’m not a fan of genre novels myself, but I think my fellow undergrads and the literary community are wrong for totally writing off such novels. Read more »

Whenever I hear about literary awards being bestowed on new works or see a list of prizes in an author’s book flap biography, I just allow the benefit of the doubt to take over.  I don’t know anything about most of the awards, but I assume they’re prestigious. Apparently I’m not alone:

The American Book Awards are different from the National Book Awards … how? Is it like a National League/American League-type of thing? Which is the one that Philip Roth is always nominated for? Don’t tell anyone, but before last week we did not know that the Booker was named for a corporation. We assumed it was a dude, or an affectionate British-y version of “bookworm.”

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There’s a lot of talk on the internet right now about the writing workshop, so I thought I’d put in my two cents.

People are talking about what it means for someone else to tell you that your writing sucks (see here, here, and here).  Well, this never happens in any of my graduate writing workshops. Even the ones I was in during high school, a time when people are notoriously mean to each other, no one ever told me or anyone else “your writing sucks.”

I know, I know, I’m taking these bloggers too literally, but still, I feel compelled to respond to the sentiment behind these posts: Read more »

I wore his shirt – crisp and fresh from the laundry basket as I hung my own rain-soaked clothes to dry.  The conversation was sparse but the air was gravid with an intangible emotion.  By the end of the day, we had not touched once and he saw me off at the door, wearing my own clothes again.

He was merely an acquaintance but years after that moment he still represents the most romantic day of my life.  Those who know me know that I have trouble accepting traditional notions of romance and the labeling of anything as “romantic” is kind of a big deal for me.  Guys I’ve dated can tell you that I have wrinkled my nose at their many attempts to be romantic.  Guys I’ve dated can also tell you that my response to the first “I love you” is usually shoving something in my mouth that takes a really long time to chew.  It’s something that I’ve always felt really bad about – especially as a writer.  Falling in love is such a common theme in storytelling that the Anti-Romantic can really feel left out.

Over coffee with a friend earlier this week, we discussed the impracticality and inconvenience of falling in love.  Science has found falling in love akin to mental illness so… yikes – what do I need that for? My friend and I conceded to the fact that like any common virus, lovesickness will find its way to us one day regardless of how ready we are for it.  He added that the only thing we really have to fear regarding falling in love is if it were unrequited.  Read more »

Fry finally finds the words to express himself to Leela via conversation heart

In my first semester of college, Facebook was known as The Facebook and was restricted to only a handful of universities.  It had yet to include any of the schools my friends attended and was not at all the Facebook that we know today.  There were no status updates, no photos, no wall and looking back now – I wonder how we made any use of it at all.

Because of this, my high school friends and I were forced to keep in touch via what is now kind of the old-fashioned way – mass email.  I would come home from a full day of class to find a couple new emails in my inbox and I’d sit there scrolling through them one by one.  Though I was filled with the frenetic energy that comes with that first year of freedom, these emails were soothing in its familiarity.  My high school friends were almost all writers and/or actors so they had no trouble eloquently expressing themselves with their own distinct voices.  I never really had to look at the email address or signature to know whose email I was reading.

However, there was one very extreme exception to the rule.  One of these friends (let’s call him Frank) was our token quiet kid.  Among the boisterous theatre geeks, he stood out with his reserved, buttoned-up demeanor.  Frank spoke only when spoken to and he replied with the maximum of three squeaky words at a time.  Strangely enough, Frank’s emails were solid pages of witty, lyrical compositions.  Read more »

David and Goliath--the original underdog?

There is something distinctly magical about the idea of the “underdog.” Seemingly present in most–if not all–fiction, the underdog is only too easy to identify with. Who hasn’t felt that the world is against us, our problems are too great, our skills are too inadequate? What ultimately happens to this character becomes tantamount to our own abilities to succeed, or to fail. The need to read on, to learn how the underdog will summon his strength and overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds, consumes us.

As the saying goes, everyone loves an underdog.

But I wonder if this intense bond we tend to form with our beloved underdog stems not from simple empathy, but from some more primeval source. I recently was reading a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, an interesting analysis of the origins of war and ritual sacrifice, which despite its subject matter provided some insight as to why we crave fiction and how, like ritual sacrifice, it might satisfy an unconscious, primitive hunger we all share. Read more »

Lawrence Tarpey's "Pinocchio"

An old boyfriend once told me that I was the worst liar he ever knew.  He told me he could hear that distinct quiver in my voice and see the slight shift in my eyes every time I told a lie.  What he sadly never learned in our short-lived relationship was that these were calculated moments concocted to conceal my true dishonest self.  I had lulled him into believing I was a terrible liar in order to conceal the fact that I was actually great at it.

Before you go analyzing the verity of every past conversation you have ever had with me, please know that I’m given more crap for being too honest than lying too often.  I am that person in your life that tells you your latest script bored me to death and that your new girlfriend’s voice is the source of my migraines.  Though I choose not to engage it in often, lying is a necessary part of life.  Imagine if I had been completely honest with my old boyfriend? Or if he had been completely honest with me? The upside is that we probably would have wasted less time together but we also would have left the relationship with less of our dignity intact.  But forget all that – Lit Drift isn’t a dating column (at least not until Cosmo starts linking our articles) – I’m here today to hopefully find the correlation between great liars and great writers.  Read more »

I should've known what I was in for with this poster...

I’ve just returned from an incredibly enjoyable breakfast at The Smith with a good friend that I haven’t seen in some time.  We caught up a bit and discussed our lives in the city a couple years post-film school.  In our catching up, I told her about a screening I went to yesterday for the much anticipated film New York, I Love You. I felt that after a solid 15 hours after my viewing of this film, I’d be calm enough to discuss it rationally and gently encourage her to wait until it comes out on DVD before seeing it.  Instead, a certain rage and fury came flying out of my mouth along with flecks of my ham, Gruyère and egg brioche (okay, that last part was a lie – I just really wanted to relive my breakfast in any way possible). Riding on the success of Paris, Je T’aime, this collection of somewhat cohesive short films was expected to be vignettes of people’s lives accented by the essence and nuances of the city.  In some cases, it turned out to be a complete mockery of what Hollywood thinks this city is and in others, it may as well have been Random City in Middle America, I Love You.

May I also point out that there was no storyline featuring a black character? Or a gay character? Asian characters were only the most overused stereotypes – cab driver, hooker, laundromat owner.  The movie was shameless in its portrayal of New York.  Did a tourist make this film? At one point someone actually says, “This is why I love New York – moments like these.”  Unlike most feature length situations, this project has multiple directors and multiple writers to blame.  Brett Ratner (who was at the screening for a Q&A afterwards) was one of them.  His short was probably one of the most enjoyable – based on his real life high school prom night.  Though Ratner is an alumnus of NYU, he did his growing up in Miami so the original story is Floridian… other than the story taking place in New York and a rather unnecessary voiceover discussing how many drug stores there are in New York, there was nothing very New York about it.

Well, then what was I looking for, you might ask? If I’m going to complain so much, how would I have fixed it? Read more »