ATTN JMS: The Ellison Connection

[B5JMS Poster]

Subject: ATTN JMS: The Ellison Connection
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 No. | DATE        |  FROM
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+  1: Jul 12, 1996: kogutt at colorado.edu (SCAVENGER)
*  2: Jul 12, 1996: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
+  5: Jul 13, 1996: yanjuna at minerva.cis.yale.edu (Junsok Yang)
*  6: Jul 13, 1996: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)

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From: kogutt at colorado.edu (SCAVENGER)
Lines: 30

Hi,

So there I was reading EDGEWORKS, VOL1. (the first in a series of books
published by White Wolf Publishing (yes the Vampire people) reprinting the
works..all of them is planned..of Harlan Ellison.)  

Part two of the book, reprints An Edge in My Voice, a series of opinion
columns that Harlan wrote for various publications in the early-mid
eighties.  Well, over the course of the book, he also reprints letters to
the column. As fate (or the Vorlons) would have it...one of the letters is
from Joe (oh yeah, I;m gonna type his last name...I can;t even get column
right!)

So, my question is, was this your first interaction with the man who a
decade later would be the Creative Consulant on your televison
masterpiece?  If not, what was?  (Harlan Ellison is on the fast track to
becoming one of my favorite writers, and is 2nd on the list of people I
want to meet, and I'm finding Harlan Stories to be endlessly fascinating)


---SCAVENGER

-- 
"You cannot live your life by the outmoded class conventions of the
neo-imperialist society.  Find your true center!" ___________________________
"What?  You mean Zen piracy?" --The Pirate Movie  |SCAVENGER / Nikodemus    |
         Non Tenete Paenitentias                  |     kogutt at colorado.edu |
         -----------------------                  ---------------------------



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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Lines: 53

"So, my question is, was this (An Edge In My Voice) your first interaction
with the man who a decade later would be the Creative Consulant on your
televison masterpiece?  If not, what was?"

Depends on how you define interaction.  I grew up reading Harlan's books,
and his commentaries on writing very much formed and influenced my own. 
When I was in junior college, and I hit a period where the writing wasn't
selling (it had before, and did later, but I hit a slump at age 18),
noting his phone number in one of his books, I risked a call.  It went
something like this: Phone rings.

"YEAH WHAT?"

"M-m-m-mister Ellison, my n-name is Joe Straczynski, and --"

'WHAT?"

"Well, see, I'm a writer, well, trying to be a writer, and lately my stuff
isn't selling, and I was thinking maybe you had some advice on --"

"Listen, kid, if your writing isn't selling, there's a simple reason for
it."

"Which would be?"

"It's crap.  Stop writing crap and you'll sell.  Anything else?"

"Errrrr....no, sir.  Thank you."  (click, and then hide in basement for 7
days.)

It's the same dopey question I get sometimes, and the folks who ask don't
know any better than I did at the time that there IS no answer to that
question.  There was absolutely nothing he could've said to me that
would've meant a damn.

Years later, we met again in person, first at a Writers Guild picket at
CBS, then at the occasional social function.  Somewhere along the line, we
became friends.  One day, over dinner, I recited the above incident to
him, asked if he remembered.  He said yes, and asked, "Were you offended?"

I considered it.  "If you'd been wrong, I'd've been offended.  But looking
back at what I was doing then, having gotten too caught up in academia and
what school teaches you writing is *supposed* to be about...it WAS crap. 
As soon as I knocked that out of my head and just followed my gut, I began
selling again."

We're best buddies.  Funny old life, ain't it...?


 jms




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From: yanjuna at minerva.cis.yale.edu (Junsok Yang)
Lines: 27

In article <4s6a73$2to at newsbf02.news.aol.com>, jmsatb5 at aol.com says...

>I considered it.  "If you'd been wrong, I'd've been offended.  But looking
>back at what I was doing then, having gotten too caught up in academia and
>what school teaches you writing is *supposed* to be about...it WAS crap. 
>As soon as I knocked that out of my head and just followed my gut, I began
>selling again."

  It's absolutely amazing how many writers (biographies such as Asimov's; 
statements in print by Harlan Ellison and others; and posts by various 
authors in rec.arts.sf.written) say the same thing:  That except 
(possibly) for grammar, most academic writing courses and (especially) 
literary analysis course are absolutely useless for writing good stories... 
Makes me glad I didn't take any literary courses in college.  :)  [Not that 
I want to be a writer.  I'm happy enough reading or viewing what other 
people wrote.]

-- 
*********************************************************************
   "Of course life is bizarre.   The more bizarre it gets, the more
interesting it is.  The only way to approach it is to make yourself
some popcorn and enjoy the show." ...David Gerrold
      
                      Junsok Yang (yanjuna at yalevm.ycc.yale.edu)
                                  (yanjuna at minerva.cis.yale.edu)



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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Lines: 89

"That except (possibly) for grammar, most academic writing courses and
(especially) literary analysis course are absolutely useless for writing
good stories..."

I will, however, make a slight exception for a number of university
writing *workshops*, where the student is encouraged to write a lot, find
their own style, an get critiqued, mercilessly, by fellow students.  With
that proviso in mind....

I do agree that the majority -- not all, certainly, but from what I've
personally experienced and encountered from others -- of college or
university writing classes, where they tell you how to write, are more or
less useless, and can even hinder a writer's development.  For starters,
there's a very special kind of literary writing or style -- very
nihilistic, eschewing anything as crude as plot or (gasp!) commerciality
-- that is in vogue at most universities that is utterly useless in the
outside writing world, unless you choose to make a career going on and
teaching this same kind of writing, and placing little literary
structureless stories in college literary magazines, which pay in copies
and are sucked into silence thereafter.

In many creative writing classes, the goal is for the teacher to get you
to write in a way he finds acceptable, what he considers proper writing
style, and fundamentally to write like he does.  Now, it's true that first
you have to have the basics of langauge and grammar down first, you must
know the rules before you can break them with any degree of efficacy.  But
once you've got those rules, the goal of a writing class should be to
encourage you to find your own voice, and remove any impediments of what
you *think* writing should be so that your own voice can come out
naturally.  Making yourself write like the teacher just so he will grade
you well is like forcing a southpaw to write right-handed.

There's also a lot of politics involved; favoritism that has nothing to do
with the craft.  At a creative writing class I took at Southwestern
College, I was nominally the star pupil...until one day the teacher began
going after a young woman in the class, being extremely insulting,
derisive, and it was clear she'd been trying, and she was in tears, and
given my background this is the one thing I won't stand for, and next
thing I knew a voice yelled out from the back of the class, "LEAVE HER
ALONE."  To my surprise it was me.  Suffice to say we "got into it," to
use the vernacular.  From that day on, though nothing changed in my
writing, I began to get D's on everything instead of the A's I had
received previously.  And at the end, the instructor announced that I
would *never* be a writer.  (For five years thereafter, I regularly mailed
him clips of my latest published article, story, reviews of plays...you
get the idea.)  You play the academic game, you get the grades, and you're
a writer...you don't, and you aren't.  Absurd.

For one semester, I actually taught writing at San Diego State University,
taking my tack of not telling students how to write, just encouraging them
and guiding them in their own efforts.  Anyone who published a story or
article in a professional publication would receive an A for the semester,
guaranteed.  And by semester's end, about half of them had done so, and
many others did so later, after the semester was over.  Others placed
pieces in smaller publications (worth an assignment-grade A).  The other
instructors *hated* me, and what I was doing.  They insisted that writers
shouldn't care about publication, and they had a very bad feeling about an
actual selling writer teaching writing instead of someone with an academic
background in the area.  (By then I had almost 100 published pieces and
3-4 produced plays.)  Yes, Emily Dickenson died without publishing a word;
but it was written such that it is still around now...and would've been
publishable at the time had she not been painfully reticent about it.

All of which is why I definitely did NOT want to get a degree in writing;
the academic approach, especially literary analysis, is complete anathema
to creativity.  Not everything can be reduced to literary theory, and if
you put the theory in front of your creativity, it's like putting a
boulder in front of a train, you'll never leave the station.  Analysis is
what happens *after* the fact, not what goes into the hopper *during* the
fact.  It makes the writing artificial on the best of days, and reduces
you to the caterpillar trying to decide which foot goes first on the worst
of days...you're too aware of structural/literary process and analysis,
when writing is at core an intuitive process.

So while an initial creative writing class is okay, you should always move
on as fast as possible to workshop situations.  Take what you can about
the basics, and get the hell out fast.  (And workshops, while more useful,
can also be a trap, if you begin writing to the flow of the workshop; once
you begin to know what the group likes and doesn't like, you can tailor
too closely to that.  The other trap is that you get out the need to
publish within the group, and never leave that particular womb for the
real world of magazines, books, theater and media.)



 jms



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