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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I don’t understand this anxiety about TV supplanting literature as the main cultural vessel for our stories. Why does it matter? To me, TV and literature are on the same team. It’s the stories themselves that matter: good stories are good stories, regardless of what medium they reach us through, and there are television shows on the air today that way down the line will be treated with the same level of legitimacy that the “classics” receive now. What’s really interesting is that I would bet that the few television shows that do endure will share the same basic themes as many of our most beloved and respected books. In fact, there have even been a couple of times that the most popular shows of our time have expressly borrowed or paid homage to  “great” works of literature, adapting them for a modern audience. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

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Was James Joyce the best writer of all time? The Modern Library thinks so...

One byproduct of our culture’s ravenous appetite for media is a serious and insatiable addiction to lists. Have you guys noticed this? We just love organizing and ranking things, we’re all secretly obsessed with the whole nerdy taxonomy of classifying and comparing. Just check out the most  popular stories on Digg right now, I’m sure that a list recounting “The Top 20 Whatevers” is somewhere on there (at the time of this writing it was the  “24 Coolest Steampunk Weapons from Another Era,” but I’m sure that it will subtly change to reflect my point as time goes on). Yes, lists are great, especially for blog posts; after all, by their very nature they foment discussion (give people an excuse to argue about things that are arbitrary and impossible to prove).

But oh man there is one list out there with the weight of a venerated publishing house behind it, a serious list that puts all our other compulsive comparisons to shame. I first encountered it on the inside jacket of a copy of Ulysses that I was reading in college, and I’ve been in awe of its ambition and badassedness ever since. I’m talking about the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels.

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On my computer there is a folder labeled “Short Stories”. In that folder lie 20 or so opening paragraphs to short story ideas I’ve had the last few months. They range from a delusional bus ride, a sleep-running businessman and my dog’s neurotic nature when he can’t find his toys. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all unfinished.

Think of the process to becoming a writer like the process of building a brick wall.

I’ve always been one to shoot for the moon and be really pissed off if I land amongst stars. It’s a problem I think most young writers and artists in general go through, setting lofty goals for ourselves and getting angry when they aren’t met.

My problem is that I want to be published in the New Yorker right now. Read more »

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

- Elvis Costello

Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say...

Oh Elvis. You’re so wise. It’s true, using one medium to describe another is always a challenge, and writing about music is no exception. This of course hasn’t stopped people from trying; there is a massive and constantly-expanding network of fanatical bloggers and music critics out there, passionate listeners who deconstruct every obscure indie release in excruciating detail, who obsess over artists 99.8 percent of us have never even heard of. And you know what? Despite its occasional pretensions, I love this community; their relentless sifting of new music has lead me to some great bands, and they are ultimately the ones who identify and dictate what music will be popular in the future.

What I don’t love is the style of writing that many of the people in this community employ: the use of fragmented images and phrases to try and illustrate what a particular piece of music sounds like. You’ve probably read some of this before; a reviewer will attempt to describe a song by writing something nonsensical like: “The verse shimmers along, buoyed over a gentle sea of bass by airy wisps of keyboard, until it explodes into the chorus, a glorious cacophony of overdriven guitar and distorted drums.” This style of writing is ridiculous and a waste of time. No one could ever read one of these crazy streams of consciousness and gain any real kind of understanding of what the song actually sounds like; music is too subjective, and the terms used in these descriptions are too abstract to be useful. (They are also often repeated – for example, the verb explode is one of the most prevalent and pernicious words in all of music writing, appearing in about 60 percent of music reviews. It seems like every song is combustible.)

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Ani DiFranco has this song called “Soft Shoulder” from her album To The Teeth.  I love that song.  The first verse is perpetually stuck in my head:

I don’t keep much stuff around
I value my portability
but I will say that I have saved
every letter you ever wrote to me

I want to be able to value my portability.  I’ve lived in four different cities and seven different apartments in the last six years, and sometimes I wish that moving was as easy as filling up a backpack and a little satchel and walking to the next destination.  That’s what I imagine Ani doing.

I’m no pack rat, but I do have a few boxes of letters, postcards, ticket stubs, mementos, school work, photos, and Xerox copies of interesting articles.  And books.  I’m not a collector — I think I have less than 150 books — but the books take up the most space each time I move. 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 »

Christmas carols. They’re inescapable this time of year, they’re waiting for you behind every corner. From diners and taxicabs to lobbies and laundry mats, these upbeat tunes are there to get you all fuzzy and drunk on the spirit of Christmas, whether you want to or not. However, the next time you hear one of these jaunty jingles, you should listen a little bit closer. What you’ll hear in the margins of some of these songs may surprise you. Some of our most popular carols, songs that we’ve all probably sung along to at some point or another, actually contain dark undertones of melancholy and aggression. Read more »

I’m re-hashing an old debate here, but I only want to rehash it for the sake of silencing it once and for all:

Is writing creatively something that can be taught?  Is getting an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts degree) in Creative Writing a waste of time and money?  [Read the instances of these arguments: Should Creative Writing Be Taught? and here Why Always Write in a Room Of One's Own?]

Okay, let me say right off the bat that I’m not a fair candidate to debate this issue since I’m currently enrolled in an MFA Program.  But I think I can still fairly go on a mini-rant. Read more »

Sometimes I feel like a broken record.  I say it over and over again — the Internet is making people more literate, not less.  (We’ve written about this before — see Jennifer’s great post about “the new literacy” here).

Then a column like this comes along and I feel like I have to debunk it or at least go on a rant for a bit:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé…The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing. It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it…Meanwhile, a generation is tuned, increasingly and sometimes exclusively, to the cacophony of interactive chatter and noise, exciting and fast moving but plethoric and ephemeral. The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

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