NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/misc/writing/3601

Text File | 1992-11-23 | 1.8 KB | 43 lines

Newsgroups: misc.writing
Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!stanford.edu!rock!concert!sas!mozart.unx.sas.com!sasafw
From: [e-mail] (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Graduate School
Originator: [e-mail]
Sender: [e-mail] (Noter of Newsworthy Events)
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Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 14:52:15 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Crawford Kilian) writes:
|Academe has sheltered a lot of good writers (not to mention the cheerful
|hacks like me). But it does tend to academicize those writers, imposing a set
|of values that may or may not suit a given writer. Literature as an art would
|do better if it could draw on writers from wildly diverse backgrounds with
|wildly divergent agendas.

I agree completely.  (Well, not about the "cheerful hack" part--I haven't
read your stuff yet, so all I can say is you do seem fairly cheerful.)

It's damned hard for a writer who is, to borrow a monastic phrase, "in
the world" to work a day job and write, and it's hard to survive off the
proceeds of writing alone.  So the idea of taking shelter in a
university, where you can earn a survival wage working the equivalent of
part-time for 9 months of the year, is awfully attractive.  The hidden
cost is that the shelter itself insulates the writer from the world, and
academic politics, peer pressure, and so on also have their effect on
the writing.

My answer to the dilemma has been to write very, very slowly.
Eventually, I think, I'm going to have to take some time off and try to
write very, very fast.



--
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  [e-mail]
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |