Writerly Advice

I was up at the radio station today & one of the student programmers was trying to finish an assignment for a creative writing class.  The assignment was to come up with five or so ideas for a short story.  He seemed put out, & so I suggested he write about some of the ridiculous things that had happened at the radio station.

He said that he always thought writing about his own life was lame.  That seems to be a new thing - back in the day when I wanted to be a writer, the idea was that you wrote about what you knew, & what you knew was of course your own life & experiences.

By the way, yes, I wanted to be a writer.  The writing on this blog should serve as the reason that I didn't.  I figured out before it was too late that I wasn't a very good writer at all.

Anyway, I confessed to the student that I wanted to be a writer & that all I ever really wrote about was myself.  I said, "I kind of always wanted to be like Jack London, you know, going out & having adventures that I could write about."

"Why didn't you?" he said.

"I realized," I said, "that I didn't really care too terribly much about other people & therefore couldn't muster up the interest to write about them."

That may seem a little self-involved, but it's more or less true - I could have gone out & had some kind of experience but I probably wouldn't have paid a hell of a lot of attention to the people around me & definitely wouldn't have taken the time to try to capture their dialect or the things that interested them.  Because chances are they wouldn't have interested me.  Writers, it seems, should have hungrier minds than I have.

As well, I've never been good at extracting wisdom or insight from experiences I had.  A short story of the experience would be more like a set of declarative sentences stating facts than something that wrung meaning out of a life event.  When I did try to do that, ouch, it felt forced.

Have I ever shared one of my short stories here?  They're not very good.  They all end with the protagonist (usually me) just leaving,  A cafe, a house, a room, a car.  Exiting.  In general, they have no plot, & they don't begin or end.  They just kind of stop continuing to the next page.

I urged him to write about things that happened to him, though.  What the hell.  It could just be one idea of his five.

I don't know if he took my advice.