Martin L. Shoemaker

As a working professional writer and guy who has actually taught creative writing classes (only mine were about how to make money at writing as opposed to academic navel gazing) I am constantly amazed just how dumb and out of touch opinionated internet randos are about how becoming a better writer actually works. The single most important resource a writer has is his enthusiasm to write. Anything that stomps on that enthusiasm is the kiss of death, especially when you're starting out and don't really know what you're doing yet. The reason most creative writing classes suck and utterly fail at teaching students to write is they suck all the joy out of the process. They tack on a bunch of arbitrary bullshit rules and regulations (all of which we can find examples of really successful authors who routinely violate those "rules") and then you get graded not on if people get something from your art, or even better, would people be willing to pay you for your art, but rather on how good you adhere to those arbitrary rules which are totally meaningless outside of that one teacher's class. There's a lot of classes that are more anti-creative writing than creative. Which is why when actual working authors see a meme about some absurdist classroom bullshit we've got zero problem believing it, because we've all seen variations of it in real life. There's this silly pervasive belief that to get good at something you need to suffer first. You need to be forced to do a bunch of crap that you don't want to do before you can tell the kind of story you want to tell. No, you really don't. Who gives a shit? Interestingly enough I see the same dumbass philosophy in how schools teach reading to younger kids too. I've gone off on this a bunch, but the way we teach English lit to children is fucking asinine and totally ass backwards. So by the time kids get done torturing a turgid novella about the ennui of angsty Jazz age New Yorkers looking for Freudian symbolism in every friggin' line for an entire semester the kids come out of there hating books and never reading again. When it comes to actual professional business development creative writing classes are about the most ass backwards thing ever, because the gate keeper of taste is one person-usually a failed author themselves-declaring if something is good or not. When in reality good is determined by the audience, audiences are wildly diverse, and what one audience will think is garbage will be a bestselling mega hit to another.