Strange, pseudo-inspiring snippet for the day

Frank Zappa said it best: "Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.”When total strangers find out that I’m a gosh-darned-soon-to-be-published author, they eventually end up asking about my educational background. The inference is usually that they’ve always wanted to write, but didn’t “go to school for that.” No English degree. They didn’t go to J-school. They didn’t drink heavily and move to Key West––that kind of thing.

Well, truth-be-told, neither did I. My degree is in art and design. My college classes involved understanding the subtle differences between burnt umber and burnt sienna. I drew sweaty naked people beneath hot studio lights. I didn’t write anything.

So despite the proliferation of MFA programs (which is an interesting discussion in and of itself), the fact remains that humans have been telling stories long before written languages even existed. Or even English degrees. It all starts **up here**. The rest is just desire.

With that in mind kids, the super-secret word for the day is: autodidact.

More on that tomorrow.

Comments

[Maureen]

The word autodidact makes me think of Tobias Wolff every time I hear it or see it because at this lecture I went to he said that Leo Tolstoy was autodidact and I thought that was really amazing even after I went to look it up to find out what it meant. I was hoping it meant part machine, but its actually meaning is cool too.

[David I]

Yeah, my grad school didn't include English or creative writing classes, either.

On the other hand, signing up for some novel workshops and joining some writers groups was vitally important to me when I first started scribbling. There's nothing like a sea of bad manuscripts to slap some sense into your own writing.

Plus the instant captive audience: as Pinocchio would say, it's almost like being a real boy.

[Katie Alender]

I went to film school, which in its own way did help learn writing. More accurately, it influenced the way I tell stories, I'm sure.

[kathie]

Uh, well, my PhD is in education. So how does it fit into my writing world? My dissertation was ethnographic...which means I wrote a big long story of an African American girl and her family and the way literacy fit in and influenced their lives--threw in some quantitative data and in it found the joy of writing. Without a doubt that process, though content-wise isn't similar, allows me to combine story telling with research and voila, I write historical fiction. Sometimes I wonder what the hell took my writing mind so long to kick in, but then I see it all serves a purpose...

[Daniel Hatadi]

Drawing sweaty naked people should be a prerequisite for all authors.

Thanks for letting me know about the storySouth award, I'm a very happy little Vegemite.

[ZenPanda]

I always think of writing for a living as an art anyway. :-)

[captblackeagle]

Frank Zappa also said "Watchout where the huskies go..don't you eat that yellow snow"...good advice.

[quick]

Nice topic. I think about this quite a lot. I often wish I had studied because I might be more ahead than I am. But I couldn't do it. I've had short stories published and won an award and now I do loads of art journalism and humour, but the magazine stuff was an unexpected and kind of recent development. A bit of direction when I was young would have been good.

But then so is finding out stuff for yourself on the run.