| Passing on good advice I received... | [Feb. 3rd, 2009|08:18 pm] |
In one of my creative writing classes, my prof gave me the same piece of advice twice. Yesterday, I got to pass that advice on to one of my own students (OK, so I'm not his teacher, but tutors can be writing coaches too!).
I'm not entirely clear on what the assignment was, but it involved stories a few pages long, mostly involving climbing mountains. One of the students in my group decided to go all-out with his suspense-novel imagination, and had a climber stranded for months, taking shelter in a pile of the frozen corpses of the rest of his climbing party.
Now, this was definitely a rough draft by a ninth-grader (who'd been told by previous teachers to cut down on detail and story length...quite wrongly!), but it had piles of frozen corpses potential. I had to give him the same advice that my professor had given me, though:
"It needs to be more brutal."
The poor guy clearly knew that for his story to have the impact that it demanded, it would have to devolve into cannibalism -- slowly and with great detail, as the lone, starving survivor finds the idea of taking advantage of all that frozen meat just a little bit less unthinkable with each cold and miserable day. Unfortunately, a fear (probably well-founded) of having his story labeled "disturbing" kept him from giving himself permission to give his own writing the respect it deserved. Blah -- I miss my creative writing professor. |
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