Yeah, welcome to academia. I went through the same thing, and so have lots of other geeks. Trust me, you'll survive.
And anyway, if your instructor doesn't know anything about fantasy & science fiction, you would probably be getting pretty inane feedback anyway. It's probably better to stick to material that the instructor is well versed enough in to comment on intelligently.
Though I'd be curious to ask this instructor which of the following authors' work would and would not be welcome in the class: Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Aimee Bender? Michael Chabon? Jonathan Lethem? Kelly Link? Jeffrey Ford? Stephen King? China Mieville? Philip K. Dick? Ted Chiang? H. P. Lovecraft? Iain M. Banks? Where does this person draw the line? And on what basis? I don't see how anyone in the current literary culture could reasonably nix at least the first few, and even that much of a concession would grant you an awfully wide latitude to incorporate more imaginative themes into your work.
Marquez is more than welcome, Dick is not. My teacher actually used him as an example of what we shouldn't attempt during the semester, so I know not to include any androids in my stories. I asked him about it afterwards, and he said that if I can make a convincing argument for it, he may allow something from the genres I'm more used to. But you're right--his reasoning is that he's a graduate student with little experience in genre fiction, so he's not as familiar with the conventions that we all know and love
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dang, your teacher is stricter than either of mine were. they didn't care what we wrote, except if it was romance for one teacher (she actually was lenient with this one as long as it was done well), or if we wrote a lot of suicidal/death type things...cause then she'd have to report us to the guidance counsellors haha!! she was the one i wrote my alpha application story for too... the other one didn't really care. he didn't want to "hinder" our creativity...which also meant he didn't want to tell us what to write (or fix) because that would be "changing our words." ....*lame
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I just think it's funny how "magical realism" isn't considered to be fantastical, so that a fairy walking downtown is bad but a store that disappears and reappears (or something of that nature) is perfectly fine. I don't like ambivalent magic--the rules are too lenient. Enjoy Daytona. I'm boiling here, too. Well, the rain boils off the ground once the hurricanes pass. I'm not exactly sure where Daytona is in relation to me--but you shouldn't trust me if I do think I know. I was walking in the completely opposite direction for one of my classes today, and ended up wandering in the heat for an extra twenty minutes. My shirt was sticking to my back all through the class.
But Dave's right -- it's not an uncommon attitude to come across in academic workshops. Frustrating, but definitely not uncommon.
Your approach to the situation seems much more constructive than mine was, though. Pitched battles about one's workshop leader's ignorance, while entertaining, are perhaps not the best way to learn in such a setting ... ;)
I figured I should let it slide. Besides, Neil Gaiman once said the best way to become a writer was to read everything--so I'm both reading and writing everything. It'll be an experience, at the very least. Maybe not a good one, per se, but an experience. Plus, I'm at this school for four more years. I'd better find some way to write, and this is the only kind of fiction writing class (sans poetry) on campus.
The best thing about writing non-genre fiction is making it sound like genre. I've got some stuff that is totally "I'm a boy, you're a girl, there are no elves and demons here, but it sure reads like a faerie could pop up at any second in this rainy soybean field."
You have to put your magic into your words instead of your story.
It is better to not write in your usual genre for a class or workshop than to write in it and not get the feedback your genre requires. I did a workshop back in college, mostly because my roommate told me to (she and her department ran it), and I turned in an eight-thousand-word story involving a lot of jargon... and the Designated Pro picked my story out of the fifteen or so to show how he didn't understand what was going on. Read a bit aloud, asked people who hadn't read it what was going on, things like that. Well, of course people who hadn't read it wouldn't know the words picked out from the middle of the story-- they were slightly defined in the beginning. He was not reading it the way the reader I wrote it for would
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And anyway, if your instructor doesn't know anything about fantasy & science fiction, you would probably be getting pretty inane feedback anyway. It's probably better to stick to material that the instructor is well versed enough in to comment on intelligently.
Though I'd be curious to ask this instructor which of the following authors' work would and would not be welcome in the class: Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Aimee Bender? Michael Chabon? Jonathan Lethem? Kelly Link? Jeffrey Ford? Stephen King? China Mieville? Philip K. Dick? Ted Chiang? H. P. Lovecraft? Iain M. Banks? Where does this person draw the line? And on what basis? I don't see how anyone in the current literary culture could reasonably nix at least the first few, and even that much of a concession would grant you an awfully wide latitude to incorporate more imaginative themes into your work.
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Enjoy Daytona. I'm boiling here, too. Well, the rain boils off the ground once the hurricanes pass. I'm not exactly sure where Daytona is in relation to me--but you shouldn't trust me if I do think I know. I was walking in the completely opposite direction for one of my classes today, and ended up wandering in the heat for an extra twenty minutes. My shirt was sticking to my back all through the class.
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But Dave's right -- it's not an uncommon attitude to come across in academic workshops. Frustrating, but definitely not uncommon.
Your approach to the situation seems much more constructive than mine was, though. Pitched battles about one's workshop leader's ignorance, while entertaining, are perhaps not the best way to learn in such a setting ... ;)
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Plus, I'm at this school for four more years. I'd better find some way to write, and this is the only kind of fiction writing class (sans poetry) on campus.
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You have to put your magic into your words instead of your story.
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