“HUMOR IS THE MOST ENGAGING COWARDICE” —ROBERT FROST
So I’ve been taking this creative writing class this summer.
For those of you who don’t know (which might be most of you) I majored in creative writing in college. Besides how to cope with life-long unemployment, my degree taught me how to let myself be vulnerable to criticism.
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Nothing is as terrifying and potentially ego-bruising as “constructive criticism.”
After you’ve spent so much time on a piece of writing, you feel a maternal attachment to it. Then when your classmates criticize it, you feel like you’ve just witnessed your younger sibling get bullied on the school bus. You want to pulverize everyone in sight.
I still remember one workshop when a kid wrote an autobiographical story about his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. The professor’s response was…”Jesus… it takes so long for her die. Can you have her die earlier? The reader is going to get so bored waiting for it.”
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However, if the summer course taught me one thing…it’s that I’ve completely lost the ability to be vulnerable.
My knee-jerk reaction is to use humor to hide the things I really want to say.
For example, this summer I wrote a short story about this pathetic man who is paranoid about getting fired on “Bring Your Daughter To Work” day. I’m not sure why I thought a story with that premise would be taken seriously…but I really expected this to be a serious piece. I wanted it to be about how fragile adults are. How they try so hard to look put together, when really everything is crumbling. I wanted it to be a story about a man who wants to impress his daughter.
But instead it turned into a comedy.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but respect for humorists. I think David Sedaris and Anne Lamott are some of the best writers around.
But I think there’s a big difference between writing funny stories because you genuinely like to make people laugh, and writing funny stories because you’re afraid of being serious.
And I’ve been doing the latter.
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Just felt like sharing.
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